HOW A GAME RIFE WITH GAMBLING MECHANICS IS ANTI-GAMBLING
Why Vampire Survivors Is Addictive But Not Abusive
Poncle’s Vampire Survivors is one of the most tightly designed games I have played in recent memory. The title has been enormously successful, but the exact reasons for its success haven’t been examined as closely as I would like. This bothered me so much because what started as a hunch became overwhelmingly obvious as I dug into both VS and poncle’s career.
Why the lack of inspection into VS annoyed me so is because of the game’s almost absurd nods to machine gambling. VS makes very few attempts to mask its origins, be it the over-the-top animations and musical cues when opening a treasure chest…
…or that each character in the roster has a specific stat called “Greed” that directly affects how much gold you can pick up during a run. It’s almost as if the developer is taunting the player to call the game out for what it is. Challenge accepted then.
From the very first minute the play experience is strictly controlled by a series of overlapping mechanics that the game hardly ever reveals anything about on the frontend. But play enough, as I have, and two themes start to become obvious: Vampire Survivors leans heavily on lessons learned from slots, and at the same time unlike a casino, the game favors the player and not the house.
The best example of this is how VS treats the gambling industry’s obsession with “time on device”. Since reading Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas a year before I laid hands on VS, I recalled that one of the biggest advances in the gambling industry was what really mattered was how long players spent in front of a machine: the more time someone sits at a slot machine, the more likely they’ll feed it money. VS instead, with some late game exceptions like an endless mode or learning how to beat the reaper that always shows up to kill you, caps your time on device. Almost every play session will always end after 30 minutes, assuming you make it that far and the minute-by-minute waves of enemies don’t ruin what you thought was going to be the run.
But it doesn’t end there, because once you start plowing through the stages and regularly start getting to the 30-minute mark, VS ends up offering you the option to double the game’s speed and give you an experience bonus for using it. I’m convinced that the developer knew they had already made something addictive and made the moral decision of Well, okay. If you’re going to be here that long, let’s make it better for you.
For as much fun as VS is, its foundations come from an industry that causes significant harm, and mechanically VS feels like a reaction to that. Rather than the game having a house edge, the player, through repeated play, is offered not only the usual suite of upgrades expected from a roguelite title but also more and more means to directly control what sort of run they want out of their time spent. In other words, the near opposite of how gambling machines treat addicts, who only require money to keep going and not much else.
So with all this in mind, it ended up as little surprise when I looked at poncle’s portfolio and saw that his pre-VS day-to-day was making slots games in Unity and HTML5.
Accessing poncle.net nowadays forwards you to a linktree but wayback machine it to 2022 and you will be treated to a cheerful webpage made in CSS.
It’s also no secret that poncle doesn’t want his game to be exploitative. In his own words from a Steam news post at the end of 2022 that discusses the mobile port:
Soon after the initial success of VS, I started to look for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game. Unfortunately, nobody I spoke with was on board with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory. Months passed by and a large number of actual clones - not "games like Vampire Survivors", but actual 1:1 copies with stolen code, assets, data, progression - started to appear everywhere.
This philosophy, this idea that play can simultaneously be addictive and immediately rewarding but neither bilk the player for financial gain or suck all their time away, feels so rare nowadays in a sea of live service games. It’s what sets Vampire Survivors apart from all the other titles that attempted to quickly follow in its success. What’s shocking is that, unlike what Schüll’s book goes at length to explain, this game tells you when to quit.
Vampire Survivors is available for about 5 USD on Steam or free on mobile from your nearest app store.