Vampire Survivors has been one of the break out indie games of the last year, the addictive reverse bullet hell not only gained a large following of devout players, but also featured in numerous game of the year awards and has now snagged a shock Best Game win at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards.
In the wake of those landmark wins, we were able to catch up with George Morgan, Senior Marketing Manager at Poncle, at this year’s WASD game event, chatting about the awards, the game’s growth over the last year, and what the future holds.
TSA – So, how’s your head?
George Morgan – Uh… [Laughs] Yeah, it’s… Obviously, we’re phenomenally humbled by the whole situation. We didn’t expect this, we didn’t expect any of it. Yeah, it’s just been truly wild.
We’re just 15 people that sit in Discord, work on a game and have fun, and what we appreciate is everything around it. Last night was so far out of [the norm]. None of us wear tuxedos – I’m wearing jogging trousers now, and I don’t even jog for a start, I don’t know why I own them! Yeah, that was truly something else, and to have the whole team on stage, and we won Best Game, that was… yeah, we couldn’t have ever predicted it.
TSA – What does it mean for something like Vampire Survivors to win Best Game at the BAFTAs? Especially when going up against AAA juggernauts like God of War – Ragnarök and Elden Ring?
George – I mean, we were having that conversation at 4AM in the hotel lobby! Indie games are a phenomenal thing. Last night with Tunic winning, us winning – which still feels weird to say! – Rollerdrome winning, and God of War – [Ragnarök] winning, everyone’s on the same level pegging it feels. It feels like the first time in a long time where everyone’s on a fair level.
Someone else asked how it feels to go up against Sony’s multi-million dollar budget, but we don’t see it that way. We just want to work on [Vampire Survivors]. I love God of War, I think it’s great, and all of the other games that were nominated or won last night are all equally as phenomenal as our thing. For us it’s the community.
Everything the community feeds back to us, we read, we see, and we genuinely do. People don’t believe it, but the Discord server for the game is ludicrously huge and all of us – Luca, QA, the lead technical developer, the artists – all of us go through it and look at what they’re saying. So OK, they want more of this? How can we do that?
Everything we do is for the community, so for us to go up against Ragnarök and Elden Ring, which are behemoths, and win? It’s very overwhelming.
Poncle’s George Morgan, Laurence Phillips and Julie Craig with the 2023 BAFTA Game Design Award for ‘Vampire Survivors’. Photo by Shane Anthony Sinclair/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA.
TSA – I guess there is that different tone when compared to film awards, where you’ve got that specific Oscar season of films where actors are maybe doing a push to get an Oscar, where blockbusting Marvel movies don’t have the same chance. But as you say, everybody here was level and had that chance to win.
George – Yeah, it was nice to see. At dinner we were sat next to the folks who made We’ll Always Have Paris, and I’d never heard of that game. I was sat next to the developer and was like “Cool! I’m going to check it out!” To see people like that there and then Ragnarök and Elden Ring? Like I say, everyone’s at fair pegging and it’s great that everyone’s getting seen. It’s really nice.
TSA – Can you talk about how the team has grown through the last year? It feels like a similar story to Among Us, which started off with that core of three and they had their breakout success. You yourself only joined a few months ago.
George – Yeah, so I joined at the end of November – We had a guy on stage last night that joined Monday! Literally four days ago…
TSA – [laughs] That’s like turning up for the Super Bowl or something!
George – It’s nuts! Bless him, we got off stage and he looks at me and went “Why am I here?” And I’m like “You’re team! This is us!”
Poncle accept the 2023 BAFTA Best Game Award for Vampire Survivors. Photo by Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA.
George – Luca created his prototype, launched it, what happened happened and he realised he needed a team. I think Beth, who’s the community manager and does a phenomenal job, was the first employee, and then it’s just grown from there. Luca and the whole team looks at what we need and then we try and hire where we can.
Everybody’s got an input on everything. So, for instance, I’m marketing, I don’t understand programming, but I can see everything they’re doing and they can see everything I’m doing, and everyone gets an input. If someone thinks something’s too overpowered? OK, let’s play it and see, and if it is and it’s ridiculous? We just keep it anyway!
TSA – Well, of course, because that’s half the fun!
George – The garlic exists for a reason!
But yeah, we’ve just grown that way. We’ve had two new people since me, but everyone has the same level of input. Luca being the game designer obviously has the final say on everything, and he sees pretty much everything that everyone does, and we sometimes see what he does. Sometimes we’re surprised at things that just happen, but that also keeps it really fun [for us]. He’ll put something in that none of us have seen, and we’ll be like, what’s that?
TSA – How do you feel as a team about the notion that this has created a new genre, similar to roguelikes and soulslikes? I don’t know what people are calling it, a Survivors-like?
George – Internally we don’t say that we started a genre. We like to, I think the word we use is we defined it – no, ‘defined’ is the wrong word…
TSA – I think that’s the right kind of term. You ‘codified’ it maybe? Because Dark Souls wasn’t a totally new genre, it’s an action RPG, but it’s really challenging, has a particular tone, certain core ideas with bonfires, and now it’s built up into a new subgenre.
George – Yeah, so we came up with ‘Be the Bullet Hell’. I’ve played a lot of bullet hells, the team’s played them, and they’re one of those game types you can pick up and, weirdly, if you die you don’t mind. It’s like, “OK, I’ll just try again.”
I wouldn’t say that we invented [this genre], because games like Raiden V and stuff like that have been around forever, we just like to think we left our mark on a larger genre. Much like the Souls games; they came into the action RPG and left their mark.
Obviously I can and can’t speak for the team, but I like to think we’ve left a bloody great big mark on what that means. It’s weird to say. We don’t like to talk about stuff like that, because we’re just people who make our game, people love our game, and we love that. Seeing the stand here [at WASD] and watching hundreds of people over the last couple of days sit down and play, that’s what we love. The mobile version is free, because we want people to play our thing.
TSA – Well, I was going to ask about the price, because I can’t remember what it is exactly, but the game on PC or Xbox costs what feels like nothing really. It reminds me of the early iOS rush to the bottom in terms of pricing, but how was this pricing decided?
George – I think the way Luca sees it, and this is going to sound wild, is that he charges what he feels is fair for the production value, despite the fact that the content in the game is huge.
We always try, even with our free updates where we add a small stage or couple of characters, to say it’s just an update, it’s fine. Again, we love people playing it and we know there’s people
Sometimes we have this loose idea, we don’t really want to charge for it, we’ve built some of it, so we’ll just patch it?
TSA – I guess it’s an interesting position to have when we’ve seen indie games gain a kind of self-worth over the past decade. They’ve become a bit more boutique-y in terms of pricing, so a game like Dead Cells is, I don’t know, maybe around £20 now, but a decade ago, it would have been £8.
George – Yeah, the Dead Cells team are having a cracking time – again, we’ve played that a lot – there’s so many games that have bled through into [Vampire Survivors], and Luca’s humour has bled into it, which is a lot of fun.
But as I say, the pricing is what he felt was fair. He wanted people to play the game, the mobile game is free with one optional advert that you don’t have to watch. Game Pass, obviously. There was no grand strategy, it was just what he felt was fair.
TSA – You’ve kind of already answered it, but has there been a shifting gear from early access to post-launch and DLC?
George – No! [laughs]
Every day we always have a stand up with the development team to chat about what we’re doing. We’re all work from home, all remote, we’ve not got an office, so there’s partners in the background, kitchens and all sorts, and it’s sometimes just an odd comment. Sometimes it’s “I’ve had a really deep thought about this thing”, and we’ll talk about if we can implement it, if it will work. Sometimes people will just go off and do it.
We have a way of looking at DLC that we charge for, which will be themed ideas, so Moonspell was set in an Asian territory, while our free patch stuff is more like we’ve had an idea and we just want people to play it. That’s how we look at the content and a way of, not bundling it, but in a way bundling it for the lack of a better term.
Shortly after our interview, Poncle announced Tides of the Foscari, the second DLC for Vampire Survivors coming out in mid-April.
TSA – What does the future look like? Are you now able to lord it over all the BAFTA nominees that didn’t win, and just say “We’re putting your characters in our game”? [laughs]
George – Oh don’t…
Ages ago, and again it’s all just ideas, I said to one of the devs that if we do win – and it was such a massive ‘if’ – can we change all the enemies on the field to a tiny BAFTA? And unfortunately, we just didn’t get time, but we have tiny little things like that.
TSA – Kind of like the one-off April Fool things that occasionally creep into game.
George – We even had that chat, and we forgot that it was April Fools as well. That would have worked really well.
Thanks so much to George for chatting to us – we would like to offer our huge congratulations to the whole team at Poncle on their BAFTA wins.
