Epic: Android hardware and marketplace fragmentation really big issues

In a recent interview with the Slowdown games blog, Epic Games’s Jay Wilbur outlined the problems facing a potential move onto the Android platform.

His company has already enjoyed a massive hit on iPhone and iPad thanks to the Unreal Engine 3-powered Infinity Blade. Any hopes that this success might be replicated on Android will have to be put on hold for the time being, however.

“One of the problems with the Android marketplace is hardware fragmentation, that’s a really big issue” said Wilbur. He continued: “The other thing is marketplace fragmentation, there are so many different appstores out there.”

While Wilbur defended the Android app-shopping experience as “robust,” he said that the Google platform lacked Apple’s “very tight control.” This is proving prohibitive when it comes to developing for the relatively open Android platform.

Wilbur did show a version of the Epic Citadel tech demo running on a Samsung Galaxy S handset, but he claimed it was “not for public release.”