The Secret Sauce of Vampire Survivors
Cheap price doesn't make a game addictive, clever design does.
While the 10€/10$ increase on newly released AAA games sparks debate among the community, another pricing battle rages on the other end of the ladder: cheap indies.
Since the Steam submission process became open, more games are released each year. Everyone has a chance, as long as they can compete with all the other new games to come out and also those from past years which still receive updates & regular discounts. Naturally, large & experienced companies have a massive edge in such a hit-driven market, however, in the arsenal of indies, there is one weapon to avoid standing pale in comparison: lower prices.
Pricing a game is a tricky prospect. On digital platforms, there are no costs of goods (fabrication, transport, storage, etc.) which can normally be a good basis for figuring out a price that leaves a decent profit margin. Unlike physical products, it's financially equivalent to selling 1000 digital games at 2€ or 100 at 20€. The problem is that you have no idea of how price & volume correlate.
So, most indies try to position themselves on the market through comparison with similar games. If you're not too confident in the quality of your game, you may as well sell it for a few bucks: players won't be as demanding, and you'll make up for it in volume (the hard discount strategy). It's precisely what worked for today's subject of examination, Vampire Survivors.
Or did it? As I said, in the indie scene, there is a debate. Was the game's 2.69€ price the main reason for its success or, on the contrary, just an accelerator to propel a strong game already?
Many people believe Vampire Survivors is just another low-quality pixel art game with unimpressive (but efficient) gameplay. You know I'm a contrarian: I think Vampire Survivors has intrinsic merits, and its lucky virality couldn't just have happened to any other very-cheap game.
From Bullet Hell to Bullet Heaven
First, we have to understand the core of Vampire Survivors: which genre does it belong to? People seem to settle on the term “action roguelike” (on Steam page tags, at least), which refers to its rogue-lite-inspired progression structure, but I prefer the elegant “bullet heaven”, as it explains the core game loop better.
A “bullet heaven”, by definition, is a reversed “bullet hell” (also sometimes called shoot 'em up). In both you play an auto-shooting turret and have to move around to avoid bullets & kill enemies. The difference between “hell” & “heaven” lies in the balance of power: in a bullet heIl, you’re a fragile hero narrowly evading complex projectile patterns, whereas in a bullet heaven, you are a demi-god spitting out millions on hordes of enemies.
There lies the first “secret “of Vampire Survivors already: the core challenge is crystal clear, and you can understand the stakes from a single screenshot. You don’t need more to feel the tension and figure the objective.
There's a character with a health bar standing out in the centre of the screen from hundreds of enemies damaged by visually impressive attack effects. All the codes used are simple & well-known by gamers (damage numbers, bats as enemies, the timer, etc.), so already just with its core loop Vampire Survivors is able to communicate its promise efficiently (a topic I covered in the very first issue of The Arcade Artificer).
A bullet heaven's goal is to survive as enemies swarm you, but there is also a fundamental difference in the difficulty of evolution. The obstacles & the type of challenges don't change much throughout the experience (enemies move in a straight line towards you), but your avatar will shoot so many more projectiles (that deal higher damages).
Instead of a “David vs Goliath” scenario where you feel proud for outsmarting a tricky boss with a giant arsenal, you are the boss crushing thousands of ants.
And it's another key to understanding the Vampire Survivors’ appeal: it's a casual game at heart, where you don’t need to be mechanically skilled to feel the thrill of power. Actually, skill doesn't matter all that much here, after all, you can only move and you have few parameters to account for (avoid enemies, collect powerups & dropped XP pills, visit map locations). Your capacity to survive resides a lot more in the upgrades you chose, an other area where the game shines.
Power Race In The Casino
Vampire Survivors’ player progression is as simple as selecting the best rewards the game randomly proposes to you (this is the rogue-lite part). The bar on top of your screen is an XP meter, and every time you fill it, you get a new item to increase your stats (the usual RPG ones, damages, speed, rate of fire, area of effect size, etc.).
There are only about 30 items to collect in the game, most of which need to be unlocked (as we'll see in the next part), but since you can only hold six weapons & 6 passives. Each item has enough horizontal differentiation to colour your run: you can somewhat specialize your character with different strengths & weaknesses each time, so it doesn't feel too repetitive.
The game shines a lot brighter on vertical progression, however: rather than unlocking just those 12 items, each starts somewhat weak and has many upgrade tiers (8 for weapons, 5 for passives). The intention behind this design choice is easy to understand: rather than a reward every 2 min 30 (12 items in 30 minutes), you can have one every 23 seconds!
A trickling stat progression helps to maintain the pacing better than a step-like difficulty curve where players get boosts of power infrequently. The being said, smoothing out the progression curve doesn’t exclude the possibility of major bumbs (you can see several in the graph above), as they also feel rewarding for the player. The game’s difficulty inevitably catch up afterwards to maintain the pressure.
There's another slight advantage to such balancing: the game is more frequently paused while you're picking an upgrade, which is essential to keep it from becoming exhausting through the constant attention (and visual strain) it requires.
That being said, the upgrades aren't anything exciting (you don't get to choose how you upgrade your weapon, it's predetermined), and choices aren't significant for the most part (since the options you decline will probably show up again in the next few minutes anyway). The strategic aspect comes from selecting the right combo items to maximize your damages & survivability, upgrading them is more on auto-pilot.
Why does it work, then? Well, I'm not surprising anyone if I say that the loot mechanic has proven its power to engage players. The designer of Vampire Survivors, Lucas Galantes knows it better, too: he explicitly noted in interviews that his work on online casino games had inspired him. The chest opening animation, for instance, received a lot of polish (compared to the rest of the game): it feels like a slot machine, and it uses similar techniques to get you addicted too!
Indeed, chests have a considerable variance: you can loot from 1 to 5 items and anything from 100 to 1000 gold coins. As you can imagine, better outcomes are very rare, but the game uses a nasty trick to hook you anyway: the first six chests you get are hardcoded with respectively 1-1-3-1-5 items inside. This sets your expectations high before drastically reducing the odds.
More Structural Tricks
At this point, you're starting to see how Vampire Survivors is addictive by design, not by chance. However, this ‘casino fever’ coupled with arcadey gameplay could still quickly fall on the boring side if it wasn't for the following aspects.
First, Vampire Survivors has a simple meta-progression loop, the « lite » aspect of rogue-lite; you don't restart from zero-zero each time. During the run, you've collected gold with no particular use on the spot, but unlike the rest, you get to keep it at the end and spend it on PowerUp in the main menu to increase your starting stats (again the speed, damages, rate of fire, etc.)
The increments are tiny individually and again separated into many little bonuses, so it doesn’t feel grindy, but it’s also a sneaky way to upgrade your baseline. All cumulated powerups make a massive difference in raw stats: about 2.5x the damages and at least x2 health. Yet, you do not feel as such and believe your margin of progression has more to do with your skill & strategy.
Such a meta system, of course, has the advantage of eliminating « zero progress » runs: even if you didn't make it as far as the previous, you do not feel as if you've wasted time (or even better, you want to retry immediately with your new perks unlocked).
The other clever aspect of Vampire Survivors is its immense achievements list, giving you constant side objectives while playing the same content repeatedly. Nothing complex once again, just a reason to taste a bit of all the content: survive with each character, level up the weapons, visit maps locations.
The rewards are plenty, with new items, new characters, new locations. Nothing ground-breaking, but it just works to give you the illusion of plenty. In a game that doesn't set expectations high, unlocking alternate versions of the five levels or a bestiary menu feels like a bonus. And that might be the last secret of Vampire Survivors: it always goes the extra mile to put a cherry on the top, and the small attention leaves you contempt.
Conclusion
So, was Vampire Survivors lucky to go viral? I still believe so.
Did its creator design efficient mechanics to create a compelling experience? Certainly too.
Would it be as enjoyable if it costed 20€ and had better art? Of course.
People forget that it wasn't the low price that made people stay and enjoy the experience enough to tell their friends “about this tiny game that is much more fun than it looks”. Vampire Survivors isn't a gimmick, it's just a great (small) game players enjoy. What else does it need to be?
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