From Solo Dev to 15 Games: Poncle's Wild Expansion

Twenty-seven million players and 15 games in active development. That's where Poncle sits right now, a studio that started as one person making a game for his friends. Speaking to The Game Business, chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio laid out the company's plans during last week's London Games Festival, and the scope of what this tiny studio is attempting is staggering.

Poncle's 15 projects break down into three categories: spin-offs like the newly released Vampire Crawlers, two entirely new IPs that haven't been revealed yet, and Survivors-style games built around other franchises. Warhammer Survivors, announced recently and co-developed with Auroch, is the first of that third category. There are also additional projects in even earlier stages beyond those 15.

The way Poncle is handling the IP collaborations is particularly smart. Rather than trying to become experts in decades of Warhammer 40K lore overnight, the studio built what Sapio calls the "Vampire Survivor Engine," a template containing all the core mechanics, and hands it to studios that actually know the franchise. "We are a fan of Survivors games. Luca has 3,800 hours on Steam in Vampire Survivors. We want to play these games," Sapio said. I love that framing. Instead of treating the Survivors formula as something to guard, Poncle is treating it like infrastructure.

New studios, same indie scale

To support all of this, Poncle is opening offices in Japan and Italy alongside its UK base. But Sapio was clear these aren't going to be large operations. The plan is teams of five to 15 people working on individual projects, what he described as a "federation of studios." "We don't want to be AAA or AA," Sapio said. "We're efficient with costs. We don't take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that."

The Japan expansion is partly practical. Sapio explained that Japanese companies prefer working with Japanese offices, under Japanese contracts, and in Japanese. If Poncle wants to collaborate on Japanese IPs, having a local presence makes sense.

One area where the studio is pulling back: third-party publishing. After releasing Kill the Brickman and Berserk or Die under the Poncle Presents label, Sapio admitted the studio couldn't give those games the support they deserved. "We didn't do the best for this game," he said about Berserk or Die. That kind of honesty is refreshing. Most companies would spin a publishing pause as "refocusing priorities" rather than admitting they dropped the ball.

The whole thing reads like a studio that understands exactly what it's good at and is scaling with unusual discipline. Fifteen projects sounds like overreach on paper, but when your teams are small, your engine is proven, and your costs are low, the math changes. Poncle creator Luca Galante could have cashed out years ago. Instead, as Sapio put it, "Luca's yachts are video games." He reinvested into a free DLC collaboration with Square Enix and kept building. Whether all 15 projects land is almost beside the question. The portfolio approach means Poncle can afford a few misses, and that freedom is exactly what lets indie studios take the creative risks that bigger publishers won't. Poncle confirmed on X that Vampire Crawlers buyers on Switch will also get the Switch 2 version free, which is a small detail that says a lot about how this company thinks about its players.