Jun

15

Spore is getting closer…

Posted under Commercial, Mac, PC

The Spore Creature Creator

Although Spore’s official release date is still a few months away, the clever boffins at EA Maxis will be releasing what they inspiringly call a “Creature Creator” this Tuesday (the 17th). And the nice thing is there’ll be a free demo for budding cyber-biologists to tinker with. Yay! There’s still time to pre-order the full thing for 5 of your shiny Pounds Sterling and get the money back when buying the game in September. I’m far from an EA fanboy, but it’s pleasant not to get entirely ripped off on something like this.

I’ll personally be quite happy to be able to get my grubby mitts on part of the game, though it does raise a slightly contentious point. Plenty of titles have featured user-created content after their day of release, but Spore is being slightly cheeky. The Creature Creator will apparently be used to provide content before the game is even ready; for the next few months, you can submit anything you create to the Sporepedia, and when you first install the proper game, it’s the best of these creations from around the world which will populate your initial Spore galaxies.

So, do we, the players, get a share of Spore’s profits? What’s in it for us since we’re saving the developers a lot of man-hours in content creation? Should we just be happy that the game world will be that bit more varied on the day of release? In any case, it’s pretty certain that other developers will be watching with interest to see how successful this idea is.

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