Just over a month after its surprise release, Vampire Survivors has passed 3m downloads on iOS and Android.
According to Appmagic data, the indie hit has been installed 1.68m times through the App Store and 1.47m via Google Play.
The market split suggests that the iOS edition’s biggest territories are the US (374k downloads), Japan (312k), South Korea (164k), Russia (145k) and China (94k). On Android, the game is most popular in Brazil (242k downloads), followed by the US (182k), Russia (132k), Japan (87k) and Spain (84k).
These aren’t blockbuster numbers for a mobile launch in general, but great for an indie title with zero UA spend. For comparison, Apex Legends Mobile almost hit 22m downloads after its first month, while Marvel Snap passed 12m installs and Diablo Immortal hit 10m.
The mobile edition of the PC and console hit was announced and released during The Game Awards on December 9th. It is monetised by ads at the end of each run, and will receive ongoing support alongside the PC and console editions.
We reported that it hit a million downloads in its first week through organic reach alone. More recently, developer Poncle stated in a blog that it hurried the mobile edition of the game to market to stem the flow of clones appearing on app stores.
“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,” the developer said. “This forced our hand to release the mobile game ASAP, and put a lot of stress on the dev team that wasn’t even supposed to worry about mobile in the first place.”
Developer Poncle added in the same blog that it had talked through mobile options with several potential partners, but it could not find a firm willing to implement “non-predatory” monetisation.
“This is why we ended up with a free-for-real approach, where monetisation is minimal and is designed to never interrupt your game, always be optional and in your control trough a couple of ‘watch ads’ buttons, and doesn’t have any of that real money sinks that mobile cashgrabs are usually designed around. It’s just the full game, playable offline, in landscape or portrait, with touch controls or with a gamepad.”
Where Poncle has chosen not to implement IAPs, Habby’s Survivor.io has stepped in with great success; according to Appmagic data Survivor.io has generated over $170m in IAPs since its release in July 2022, and has amassed over 55m downloads.
