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Spore to be PC Only, For Now

Posted by Zonk on Mon Sep 11, 2006 03:08 PM
from the got-to-get-it-right dept.
PC Games (Games)
Joystiq reports the news that, for the time being, Spore will be only on the PC. This, despite Will Wright's hopes that it would see publication on the Wii, 360, PS3, Gameboy, DS, and PSP. EA seems to be wanting to 'get it right' on the PC to begin with, though, and is discounting the game's publication on those platforms at this time. From the article: "The Wii reference may be a direct result of UK magazine NGamer's recent article that suggests Spore is coming to Nintendo Wii in Spring 2007. As it stands, Wright's team is '100% focused on finishing Spore on the PC and PC only.' That said, you'd have to be pretty foolish to believe Spore will remain exclusive to any format. Like The Sims before it, Wright's latest project will likely invade every screen -- television, computer, mobile phone, etc. -- on Earth."
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Wowzer writes "EA was previously planning to bring Spore from PC to handhelds. In an interview this week Spore creator Will Wright was quoted as saying they are looking at bringing Spore to all platforms. From the article: 'You might be playing part of the game on a handheld platform, you might be playing the entire game but maybe more avatar-based on a console. The consoles are getting kind of different now, I think there's a really interesting distinction between the Wii and the Xbox 360 and PS3. Something like the Wii offers a lot of interesting creative opportunities for the editors, with the controller.'"
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The New York Times is running a long piece by Steven Johnson, author of "Everything Bad Is Good For You." In 'The Long Zoom', Johnson describes just what is so special about Will Wright's Spore . From the article: "Despite the fictions, many of the themes of Spore are immensely valuable ones, particularly in an age of environmental crisis: the fragility of life, the connection between micro- and macro- scales, the complex networks of ecosystems and food webs, the impact of new technology on social systems. Spore's players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale -- a single creature's decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle -- can end up having global repercussions. They will detect similarities between one level of the game and another, the complex balancing act of global trade mirroring the complex balancing act of building a sustainable environment. And traveling through a simulated universe, from cells to constellations, will, ideally, make them more curious about the real-world universe they already inhabit -- and show them that they have the power to shape that universe as well."
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Spore to be PC Only, For Now 50 Comments More /

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  • How would Spore be adapted to the Gameboy? Obviously there is more to it than just porting the software.

    • Re:Gameboy? (Score:5, Funny)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:34PM (#16084185) Homepage Journal
      Didn't you know, Spore was due to be initially played on the gameboy?

      Once you adapted beyond the single celled organism strong electromagnets in the cartridge would active drawing together a Beowulf cluster of gameboys.
      This multi cellular organism would then continue to grow evolving and adapting to the body parts of hundreds of children per organism.
      Once it reached a critical mass the rate of growth will slow (until measured in limbs trapped per hour) and will enter a cocoon state.
      Emerging from this fetid rotting mass will be a small group of supergeeks built from the blood sweat and tears of a thousand helpless gameboy addicts.
      They will go on to become EA programmers.
      Immortal, work hungry and with no need for sleep the title will at last be released on other platforms within a couple of work shifts.

      That was the plan anyway, damn ESRB.
      • Once you adapted beyond the single celled organism strong electromagnets in the cartridge would active drawing together a Beowulf cluster of gameboys. This multi cellular organism would then continue to grow evolving and adapting to the body parts of hundreds of children per organism.

        That's a feature in the sequel, Katamari Sporeacy.

        Cool links. [blogspot.com]
    • Rather than go off about the promised kilobytes sized avatars and fancy procedural generated content that I understand little about, I'm going to make a reasonable hypothesis based on past occurance...

      I figure it'll be a trimmed down, more goal oriented-less sandboxy version like The Sims 2 for Gameboy Advanced [gamespot.com] It'd be interesting to see if anything neat is done with the DS' touch screen, although I suspect it'll just be used as a mouse during the editing process.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:11PM (#16083941) Journal
    PC gaming is dying out. It's totally a niche market [slashdot.org] now.

  • Mac? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by carlivar (119811) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:12PM (#16083950)
    What about Mac OS X? Yeah, I know, boot into Windows. Bleah.

    • EA doesn't do any Mac ports, so the chances are pretty low :/

      • What are you talking about? EA doesn't do the ports themselves but all of the Sim games are available on the Mac. As with a lot of major games, Aspyr has done the ports. I consider Spore to be part of the Sim family, so it would actually be a break from history if Spore were not released on the Mac. We can expect it later than the PC version, but I do expect to see it.
        • Well, none of the EA Sports titles are ported. Other not ported games are:
          • Command & Conquer (except Generals)
          • Battlefield 2164
          • Black & White 2
          • The Godfather
          • Battlefield 1&2
          • All Need for Speed
          • LOTR: The Battle for Middle-Earth 1&2

          This list is just the result of a quick skimming over the EA page, there are lots of others (I'm sorry of any of the above are actually ported, diving through those web pages is pretty complicated). There are a few exceptions to that, but only the most important

      • Mod parent down. EA may not port it's games to mac by itself, but Aspyr [aspyr.com] sure does. You'll notice Will Wright's previous big project at EA, The Sims 2, on the front page [aspyr.com]. It's even a universal binary, for those with intel processors.

        As soon as Spore hits the Mac, I'll get it.

    • Re:Mac? (Score:5, Funny)

      by grazzy (56382) <{ten.ews.ekauq} {ta} {yzzarg}> on Monday September 11 2006, @04:04PM (#16084463) Homepage Journal
      It's ok. We'll forgive you if you switch now.

  • EA... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dance_Dance_Karnov (793804) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:14PM (#16083971) Homepage
    If it sells at all, this will be on every platform at some point. EA ports damn near every game to every platform.
    • i don't think selling this game will be a problem, its got some good hype, doesn't require a monster PC gaming rig as far as I can tell, and seems to fit within that oh so sellable kinda-casual type game market that The Sims is already in. So long as the game is fun and will run on peoples' computers, its gonna do pretty well.
  • So PC only does that mean only Windows based PC's or does that include other Operating Systems?

    I hate it when people use PC as a title for Windows only Computers. PC stands for Personal Computer. That includes all operating systems. So when this Article states it is PC only are they really meaning Windows only or just that it won't be available on consoles?
  • They've realized that they've spend most of the budget and need to start cashing in now. So Spore will be released for the biggest market first, and they'll focus mostly on that, until they have recovered some of their expenses.
    Then it'll come to the other markets.

    So my guess is that spore will be released faster for pc, but might be slightly overpriced.
    This will probably mean they will lower prices faster than a simultanous launch (not necessarily true) and that the other targets will be slightly lowe

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by falcon5768 (629591)
      Hate to break it to you, but Computers are not the biggest market. Easiest market to code for yes. But not by a long shot are they the biggest these days.
            • still wrong. Video games for computers are counted in the 100's of thousands sold.... console games are counted in the millions. look at any trade mag and you would see the computer game is slowly but surely becoming a nitch market. Infact the only place they are doing well, is in the puzzle game market.
        • You code for the platform that the market is based around. The PC games market is based around the ... wait for it ... PC. Computers are historically simpler to code for, given the ease of access to the hardware, and long history of development on them. For most consoles, you will have to get a dev kit from the company in order to even start looking into it.

          From what I understand, however, the gap is closing. The 360 is supposedly getting much easier to target (its just a windows box anyway), although
    • So Spore will be released for the biggest market first
      Apparently you haven't read the news, PCs are a niche market, not the biggest.

  • Spore will Bomb (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MBraynard (653724) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:17PM (#16084001) Journal
    The game is way, way too unstructured in it's sand box design. This game is going to wind up being just like Black and White in that it has some incredible features but will fall flat for being just not fun or particularly competitive.

    You heard it here first. And since it will be a flop, you are not likely to see it on any other platform.

    Will Wright being who he is, he can have flops here and there. I just hope he returns to the Sim City series and gives that the attention it needs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by johnfink (810028)
      Yeah, because all Will Wright's other 'sandbox' games have flopped. It's only his games that follow a hard script and storyline that do well.

    • Re:Spore will Bomb (Score:5, Funny)

      by Brunellus (875635) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:29PM (#16084143) Homepage

      Just like that other Will Wright bomb, SimCity [wikipedia.org].

      • Peter Molyneux had a bunch of big hits too. So did Richard Garriott. So did Warren Specter. So did Roberta Williams. Every superstar developer eventually writes their own swan song.

        I predict Spore will be fun but won't meet the stratospheric hype. Yeah, I know, bold prediction, huh?

    • Re:Spore will Bomb (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dr. Eggman (932300) on Monday September 11 2006, @03:31PM (#16084158)
      I disagree, up until the Space phase, the game is very goal oriented. At the pond your goal is to eat enough food to divide and not be eaten. WW compared it to "a version of pac-man," albeit with upgradable abilities.

      Creature phase centers around fullfilling your needs which include food, ect. until you are able to mate and then continuing to enhance your creature until you max out its brain capacity and move on to the civilization phase. I don't remember what he compared the creature phase to, but I would say it sounds a bit like the Sims (need fullfillment.)

      Civilization phase has two big parts, tribal and city. Your goal is to eventually conquer your planet and develop a ufo to move onto the space phase. Tribal was compared to populas and City was compared to a simplified Sim city, though little was given on how to accomplish your goals other than "both military and diplomatic player styles" will be able to conquer this phase.

      Finally, Space phase still has plenty of goals to work towards with upgrading your UFO and participating in a number of "mini-game" type senarios involving first contact, terraforming, ect. Really, it's not until space phase does it truely become a sandbox and you have the ability to revisit prior phases with all the ufo tech you've accomplished.
      • My concern is that for a sandbox game to be fulfilling/addictive, my late game state needs to be influenced somehow by my earlier decisions: I don't just "pass through" the protist [wikipedia.org]: the decisions I make need to impact the later game or else be meaningless. Why not just start out with a later organism, since what I do earlier doesn't matter? Or is that the point?

        In SimCity, the very first building that was ever built still exists in the later game and I'm still left with its consequences. The decision to
        • Since the Space phase unlocks the prior phases (in ways that have not been fully explained) it is reasonable to think that at that point in the game any changes you wish to inact would be possible. Perhaps they have genetic engineering to change your character again. I saw a poster that advertised "space-time" manipulation, but it might just be their version of quick interstellar travel.
    • Last I heard Simcity 5 was under way..all be it very early now. No idea who's working on it specifically.
    • This is Will Wright. He doesn't do flops. Well except for the flops. But he sure as hell ain't Peter Molyneux who has a deserved reputation of coming up with lots of ideas but failing to deliver.

      Will Wright games flop because they are too out there or just not fun but they deliver what was promised. SimCopter did exactly what it said on the box, just that nobody seemed to give a shit. So it flopped just like a lot of the other SimX games did when Maxis pumped them out by the bucketload. BUT for all their w

  • There they speak about how it will be released for the Wii, PS3, and xBox360 most likely three to six months after coming out for PC. They also talk about how they always release the Mac versions a few months later (they just released Sims2:OFB for the Mac six months after the PC version).

    No postings there to contradict any of this.

    Therefore, the conclusion should be that it will be released for WinXP on schedule, and have console versions shortly thereafter.

  • Well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar (772313) on Monday September 11 2006, @06:10PM (#16085353) Homepage Journal
    I can't say I am really suprised by this, after following the development of this game for a long time it was beginning to become clear that not only will the development process be long and laborious but there will be a substantial period after it is complete (either in internal testing, open beta testing or patching after release) needed to perfect it. I think it's definitely a smart idea, so they will be able to fix any problems and tweak the gameplay for it to be perfect before they head for the mass markets of the consoles (after all, PC games are a lot more easy to patch and easier to get the users to do so than consoles, especially handhelds).
  • I used to be a PS2 fanboy, but this is the MUST-HAVE game that's finally going to drive me to buy a PC game system!

    Schweet! ;)
  • No game that has been hyped up this much can survive. There is no way that Spore can live up to the expectations. If it's not the most fun anyone has ever had in their lives instantly upon turning it on, it will be a "noble failure" or an "interesting experiment." Or "crap."

    It's a game. There is a 9 out of 10 chance that it will be an fun little game that doesn't shatter people's minds. And there is nothing wrong with that. And if it does really well, that's great too. But by hyping it up to the poin
    • These are the definitions of a "PC" that I'm willing to accept:
      - Personal Computer (anything intended for a normal end-user, so "workstations" are excluded)
      - General purpose computers whose architectures are derivatives of the IBM PC (this would include anything x86 /w BIOS... Intel-based Macs may or may not qualify, given that they are a bit architecturally different from normal PCs with their EFI firmware)

      It infuriates me to no end that "PC" is used when people don't want to say "MS Windows". They think
    • I've wondered about this for quite some time now. I realize that a Wine/Cedega-compatible game isn't the same as a genuine Linux release, but would it really be difficult to make games that are tested to be compatible with Wine/Cedega? Yes, I know that the die-hard Linux users would prefer a true, Linux binary for their games -- and I understand that completely. (Chances are that the game would run better anyway, but I digress...)

      Wouldn't these game companies at least be increasing their market share,

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