Skip to main content

How 'Sword and Sworcery' became a global, cross-platform hit

How 'Sword and Sworcery' became a global, cross-platform hit

Share this story

Superbrothers: Swords and Sworcery EP
Superbrothers: Swords and Sworcery EP

It's been over two years since Capybara Games launched the outstanding Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP for the iPad, and since then it's moved far beyond a game just built for Apple's iOS platform — subsequent launches for the iPhone, Mac, PC, Linux, and eventually Android helped the game continue to reach new audiences. Capybara Games took a moment today to celebrate the games' success by announcing that over 1.5 million copies of the game have been sold with over 550,000 on iOS alone. That's a significant bump over the 350K that were sold as of March 2012 — to note its achievements, Capybara went into extreme detail to show exactly how Superbrothers got to where it is today.

One of the biggest indie gaming success stories

Unsurprisingly, iOS was a major force — the first platform the game launched on accounts for 33 percent of all sales and 55 percent of all net revenue for Superbrothers. However, the Humble Bundles the game has appeared as part of were also a major force in spreading the game around. Humble Indie Bundle 5 accounted for 34 percent of all sales, just beating out iOS as the top platform — since the bundle included copies for Windows, Mac, and Linux, there's no way to attribute the sales to any one platform. However, due to the "pay what you want" nature of the Humble Bundle, it only accounted for 16 percent of all revenue.

As for Android, the numbers back up the perception that Google's OS users aren't typically willing to pay much for their apps. Only five percent of sales and revenue came from Google Play sales, though the game just launched there this past December. The two Android Humble Bundles the game was part of were more successful — making up a total of 21 percent of sales but only four percent of all revenue. Regardless of the platform, it seems pretty clear that the strategy of expanding to as many screens as possible and offering a variety of different purchase and price points worked wonders for Capybara. For all the nitty-gritty details, check out the infographic below.

S_s_infographic_resize