The Pocket Gamer Podcast Episode 81 - Vampire Survivors rebrand, Where Winds Meet on mobile, and limited-time events vs DLCs
On too many games and too little time
Did you catch all the summer games reveals over the weekend? We dive into a healthy back-and–forth on all things mobile in this week's (New and Improved!) Pocket Gamer Podcast, where we're buzzing about all the new stuff that's dropped in the wonderful world of gaming.
I get the ball rolling with the announcement for Hidden Folks 2, which will be landing on mobile sometime in 2027. That might seem like it's still a long way to go, but I think it's definitely worth the wait given its lovely hand-drawn aesthetics and its mouth-based sound effects. This brings us to a discussion on hidden objects, pixel hunting, and blending in too well with the background, but before Iwan goes on a rant about that, he gets distracted by the latest round of updates for Vampire Survivors.
It's now being renamed as Vampire Survivors - First Survivaton, which goes hand-in-hand with the upcoming string of new developments that poncle will be launching around the brand. It's got Will and Iwan pretty pumped about its future on the platform, which is just one of the things that we feel works really well on mobile.
This reminds Will of Gigabash Mobile, a kaiju-based fighting game that's also been announced to arrive on mobile. We do ponder what it means to make more mobile-optimised ports, which leads us to Where Winds Meet, and Netease's upcoming third-person action-adventure, Blood Message.
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to adapting stuff to the mobile platform and catering to mobile trends, which is why Will raises the important issue of whether or not it's healthy for games to push more limited-time events as opposed to more "traditional" DLC expansions. This will always be a point of argument for a lot of people - but what do you think, though?
Do you prefer your constant stream of monthly updates and limited-time perks, or would you rather just do the one-and-done thing of buying an expansion pack and going at your own pace?
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