Heavily Hyped Spore Near Release With Big Expectations
Will Spore be the biggest thing to hit the gaming world since Doom? Electronic Arts dearly hopes so. The long-awaited game by Sims creator Will Wright has so much hype surrounding it that anything less than a home run will be a disappointment, say game-industry watchers.
Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, told The Wall Street Journal that between the cost of developing the game and marketing it, EA needs to rake in $75 million with Spore. Pachter expects EA to sell two million copies by the end of the year.
Marketing the game, which comes out in Europe on Friday and the U.S. on Sunday, is a challenge for EA’s marketers since the game seems to encompass the evolution of life on Earth from primordial stew to space exploration.
“If you told somebody you were going to be playing a game where you controlled life from a primordial soup to intergalactic travel and you have responsibility for the entire galaxy, that can seem like a pretty daunting task,” Patrick Buechner, vice president of marketing for EA’s Maxis unit, told the Journal.
Preloading Sales
EA is also making the game available online. In order to lighten the load on EA’s download servers on launch day, the company is hoping customers will download (and pay for) the game now, even though it won’t be operational until launch day. The download is expected to take 30 to 60 minutes.
EA isn’t releasing a demo version of the game, but is offering software called the Spore Creature Creator, which allows users to create their own life forms for the Spore universe. The software has already been downloaded three million times, a pretty good indicator that the game is on track to generate the same worldwide appeal of The Sims.
And Creature Creator may be coming to a computer near you. Under a marketing deal with Hewlett-Packard, the PC giant will install the Spore software on new consumer-oriented desktops and laptops.
A Creativity Hub
The scope of the game is nothing less than the evolution of humanity. “From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands,” the promotional text says.
Creature Creator may serve as the hub of an entire Spore ecosystem, Wright told Wired.com during a visit earlier this year. “I might decide I want to just buy the trading card of my creature … and never buy the PC game,” he said. “So in some sense that free creature editor might become the hub of the franchise. The PC game is just one of the spokes off that hub.”
Unlike immersive war games, Spore, while it may prove to be addictive, is a natural application for smartphones and other handheld devices. But for now, EA is focusing on the huge PC market. It is planning to release versions for cell phones and Nintendo’s DS handheld system, but the company is mum on whether it will be available for gaming consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.
The game could have some smartphone potential, said Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, in a telephone interview. “While there’s nothing new about being able to create your own characters, the ability to be futzing with your characters on a mobile device could be interesting,” Sterling said. “The iPhone has emerged as a global gaming platform already.”