Vampire Survivors Changed The Game Industry

The 2022 bingo card has had some doozies, such as Bill Clinton trending for a while and outliers squeezing into the conversation. Let's focus on the latter. For instance, Dwarf Fortress released a fully featured version to surprisingly overwhelming success after spending ages in a free version.

People were eager to spend money on a free game, it turns out. Earlier, Vampire Survivors bucked the trend in its own way, offering a tiny experience for just a few bucks. It hasn't stopped delivering since. With seemingly never-ending replay value, Vampire Survivors has penetrated the zeitgeist as one of the most successful games this year.

Instead of hiding in the shadows of giants, the game, molded mostly by one person, stands as a peer to Elden Ring or God of War, monolithic structures with multi-million-dollar budgets. Better yet, this game does so at a fraction of the cost for the consumer as well. It's been quite some time since a similar occurrence achieved such an impact. Soulja Boy mentioned Braid that one time. That was pretty big.

The success of Vampire Survivors began at the start of the year. Perfect for that post-holiday dip, after you've played all the blockbusters you got, the small game hooked you with a few neat tricks. Most of the game plays out without inputs. There is a character and a map, but combat is automated, and most of the focus goes to leveling up by picking up gems.

As they level up, players choose more potent abilities to fend off the growing horde around them. It's a deceptively easy concept that's immediately evident. All that's left is trying to build the best possible loadout and watching the chaos unfold.

Along with the ease of access, the game pairs the action with stimulus overload. It's like the craziest arcade you've ever seen, with damage numbers by the hundreds flying around, multitudes of enemies moving, things dying and leaving dozens of gems to pick up. Everything is happening all at once in this game.

Going one tier higher, chests can drop from minibosses, amplifying this jackpot feeling even more. In a reductive way, most of Vampire Survivors boils down to noises and flashing lights, but it crafts them into a tight arc that keeps you coming back. While many games resort to dark patterns in their stimuli, this gameplay offers dopamine freely, without ulterior motives.

There are even more systems there, like more maps, modes, unlocks, and so on, but this isn't a review. If you, by some chance, haven't played Vampire Survivors yet, you should correct that mistake right now. The game even launched a free mobile version, which it announced at The Game Awards. That's how deep this phenomenon has come. There's room for Vampire Survivors in The Game Awards' commercial reels.

A few weeks after its success became apparent, as it became a constant on the Steam top sellers chart, the waves of this release began to ripple. Again, most of the game is deceptively simple in its concept. Simple visuals, simple layout, simple combat; it's all too easy.

As such, it only took a few weeks for the first games mimicking Vampire Survivors to launch. Slap some assets together, put them on a map, construct the progression and you're good to go on selling your own auto-battler.

That's the genre name people settled on, auto-battler, after these copycats started popping out. Vampire Survivors, but it's mechs. Vampire Survivors, but it's cartoons. Every day, another one of these mimics would populate the Steam store.

With the cost of any one game being only a few bucks, it's been especially enticing for opportunistic developers to try and grab a piece of the pie. Since its release, there have been countless other variations on the model:

Soulstone Survivors, Bounty of One, Spellbook Demonslayers, Brotato, Boneraiser Minions, Nomad Survival, Further Still: Survivors, Project Lazarus, Rogue: Genesia.

Each of these names spins the concept with new visuals or a different progression. Games like Sexy Mystic Survivors offer sexy anime demons in deeply compromised positions to get your attention. All of them, however, are transparent in what they're trying to achieve: They're just trying to be Vampire Survivors.

It's unlikely you've heard of more than one of those titles, or of the deluge of similar games with Chinese names. These games are selling copies as well, but they're not achieving the same level of market penetration. In the past, it was more likely that one's success would be usurped by a competitor fairly quickly.

If you liked DotA, then you've probably at least heard of League of Legends. When auto-chess started growing, there was an immediate split between the original, DotA Underlords and Teamfight Tactics. It's now been a full year and the one true auto-battler still stands alone.

Vampire Survivors perfected its genre before it even existed.

They got it done in one, which is as much a stroke of luck as it is a stroke of genius. Additionally, the developer hasn't been resting on its laurels. As the player base grew exponentially, the game was able to offer small but meaningful updates regularly.

It doesn't matter when you came to Vampire Survivors; there's always more to do. By now, the game is a giant in its own right, absolutely brimming with ways to play. On Steam alone, the game boasts over 160,000 reviews and maintains a 98% positive rating. That in itself is a unique occurrence.

When was the last time the whole world agreed that a single game is good? It doesn't hurt that its minimum requirements include a Pentium 4, a processor chip made twenty whole years ago. If you bought a computer in the last two decades, you can play one of the best games this year. You wouldn't be able to do the same for Elden Ring.

It's been many years since any game has been this pivotal. We now live in a post-Vampire Survivors world, where all we can do is wait and see what its sphere of influence will achieve.

What will be the first blockbuster to implement some of the auto-battler's systems? One thing's certain: the game industry will look back on this moment in time. A new milestone has been planted and we were right here when it happened.