Why Spore is Destined to Fail

Posted by admin on January 19, 2008 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments to Read

First watch the Gary Rosenzweig MacWorld Expo official interview:

Lets remove the spin: Spore will launch for the Mac at the same time as PC? Why? Ease of development with TransGaming’s Cider Portability Engine? Nope our guess is EA fears a flop and wants to sell as many copies as possible at release. Release date still being “sometime this year”.

For a game that has been under development since 2000 this is not promising. EA has consistently stated the reasons for the delays are they want to release a “better” game. Why would it have to be better after eight years? Maybe it or certain phases of it are too long, too slow, too tedious just plain NOT Entertaining for today’s gamers. We get a hint of that in the interview when we hear “We are happy to announce that you can jump into any one of these evolutionary phases if you like. You don’t have to play straight through from cell to space” In other words we tried it and it was lame.

All we ever hear about in the video is the Creature Creator, Creature Creator, Creature Creator in fact all we ever see is Creature Creator. Rumor has it Creature Creator will be the early released demo. Could it be this is all they have working well after eight years of work?

Demo movies showing phases beyond Creature Creator are few and far between. As Ars Technica wrote in June 2007:

When you see a live demo, it’s pretty much the same demo everyone sees. It may look like the whole thing is off the cuff, but in reality you’re seeing a carefully scripted show. It’s possible giant chunks of the game are missing, and the illusion of the title being near completion is mostly smoke and mirrors. With a game this open-ended, it’s possible the development team is running into a slew of unforeseen problems.

This still holds true to this day.

The biggest problem with Spore is it is not truly multiplayer or multiplayer interactive. Spore does, as stated, allow for the things that players create to be actually uploaded into other players worlds. But the player does not control their creations at all. There is no interaction, voice communication, or chat with other real players.

This will be Spore greatest failure and it will spell its demise. World of Warcraft is the most popular online game for a reason. Not for gameplay itself or graphics. It is the social aspects of the game. Spore lacks social interaction which is not only demanded today by the Facebook, Twitter crowd but without it Spore will be an arduous tortuous even Boring Ordeal.

We leave you with this little clip. Ask yourself what is EA afraid of: