Superbrothers: more than 1.5 million copies sold

Capybara Games has released sales statistics for its hit game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, showing a cross-platform breakdown of popularity and revenue.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP — the strange, beautiful, sad, experimental game about a warrior on a mysterious quest — first launched on 24 March 2011, just over two years ago. In that time, the game has sold over 1.5 million units, developer Capybara Games has revealed; no Angry Birds, to be sure, but a number that any developer could rightfully take pride in.

In the intervening time, Capybara also released the game for iPhone (27 April 2011), PC (16 April 2012), Mac and Linux (21 June 2012) and Android (21 December 2012) — a level of cross-platform publishing not particularly common, but one that has allowed the developer to provide a detailed breakdown of sales statistics across a wide range of demographics.

The biggest seller for the game so far has been the Humble Bundle 5 for PC, which brought in 34 per cent of the game's 1.5 million sales, followed by iOS, with 33 per cent. Android takes the next slice of the pie, split across Google Play and two Humble Android Bundles — 12 per cent for the Humble Android Bundle 4, 9 per cent for the Humble Android Bundle 5 and 5 per cent for Google Play. Seven per cent of the game's sales were on Steam, and less than 1 per cent were through direct sales.

Where it gets interesting, though, is revenue. Although it only accounted for 33 per cent of games sales, the iOS platform brought in the lion's share of the revenue by far — a whopping 55 per cent, followed by 19 per cent from Steam — which only accounted for 7 per cent of sales. The highest number of sales, on the other hand — Humble Bundle 5 for PC — only brought in 16 per cent of the revenue, and Android only 9 per cent — 5 per cent from Google Play and the rest from Humble Android Bundles.

This seems to confirm what analysts have been saying for a while: that Android users are less willing to pay for apps, particularly when you take into account the percentage of people on the iOS and Android platforms who bought the app at full price — 86 per cent on iOS compared to just 23 per cent on Android.

Of course, this is just one game, and there are mitigating factors; perhaps the breakdown would be different if Humble Bundle could feature iOS games, for instance, and the game has been on iOS a lot longer than on Android. But the percentages certainly indicate that iOS is the more profitable platform, and that developers definitely do better the more platforms they support.

You can examine all the details in the infographic below.