Why Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP isn’t on Android

We caught up with Capybara’s Nathan Vella and Superbrothers’ Craig Adams after the awards show to chat about the victory–and why the winning iOS game will never come out on Android.

March 13, 2012 11:00 AM5

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP managed to beat out big names–Super Mario 3D Land and Infinity Blade 2–when it won the Game Developers Choice Awards for Best Handheld Game. We caught up with Capybara’s Nathan Vella and Superbrothers’ Craig Adams after the awards show to chat about the victory–and why the winning iOS game won’t release on Android.

“We got our start making pre-iOS mobile games. We used to make Java games and it was really hard to make games for so many different types of devices. One has a big screen, one has tilt, one has three buttons… it’s not something we’re super-keen to get back into,” Vella told us. “We just want to focus on making games.”

“We’re not trying to be exclusive. There’s limited resources. People think it’s a simple trick to just press a button–to send it to a different studio,” Adams followed-up. “But then, what happens to the craft? What happens to the soul?”

“We went through hell making this. This is a personal thing. Going back to revisit it, just to bring it over for that purpose, it has a cost. It has a cost in terms of time, energy, and sort of a psychic cost,” Adams added.

While Android users will be disheartened by the news, Adams said that the studio has done their research. “We’ve definitely looked at it, but we also have data points telling us that the audience might not respond even if we went through all that nonsense.”

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is available exclusively on the App Store. And will remain that way for the foreseeable future.