Spiderweb Software to Abandon Android Support

With a relatively short blog post, Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel explained why the company will stop selling Android ports of their games and abandon the mobile OS for the future. In short, the company that did the ports of Avadon: The Black Fortress and Avernum: Escape From the Pit went under, and they owned the source code. While Vogel would like to port the games himself, he simply doesn’t have enough time or resources on his hand. Here’s an excerpt from the post, going into more details:

As of the very near future, Spiderweb Software will be discontinuing support for the Android platform. We will be removing our games from Google Play and the Amazon App store.

If you purchased Avadon or Avernum for Android from us in the past and need a copy for your device, please contact us and we will arrange a private download or refund, as needed.

We recently had a false alarm where we temporarily thought we would stop developing for the iPad. I was able to fix some technical issues and we’re back in business on that platform. This will not be the case with Android. We may develop for that platform again, but it will be years before we are able to, if ever at all.

That’s it. We’re really sorry to anyone bummed out by this. If you’re interested about the hassles of being a small software developer, read on.

So What the Hell Happened?

In the big indie gold rush of 2011-2, there were lots of dollars sloshing around for anyone who could come out with competent products. A good business opportunity came along if we let a certain company port two of our popular games, Avadon and Avernum, to Android tablets.

We took the deal. Solid ports of the two games were made. We got a bunch of money, and a bunch of customers were happy.

However, we did not control the source code to those ports. The 3rd party company did. This means that, if things broke, we couldn’t fix them. We had to get the company to fix them.

Then the company went out of business. Now it is gone. Things are starting to slowly break.

We want to be an honest company. If we can’t support it, we can’t sell it. So off they go.