Spore: A New Breed
Author of this post: Shiraz Akmal | About Blog Authors »
This weekend, Electronic Arts Inc. released Spore, the next game from Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims. EA is relying on the new game to reinvigorate its market-leader position and boost its revenue. And while the company is projecting it will sell two million copies of Spore before the end of the year, not everyone thinks they can do it. Regardless of how sales turn out, Spore will revolutionize the way we think of gaming. The industry is becoming more user-driven and there is no turning back.
Spore represents a new breed of games being developed by companies, both large and small, across the video game industry. These user-generated, content-oriented games allow players to create and share their own content including original characters and worlds.
The ability to connect with other people online to share content and communicate has created some of the largest and most well-known companies such as Facebook and MySpace. These social networks have been successful because they can adapt and grow organically. The content and experience actually improves over time proportional to the number of people actively involved.
Games like Spore and LittleBigPlanet are using this fundamental design idea to create an experience for gamers. Developers provide the frameworks for players, but the players are the driving force that determines how the game will evolve. This transforms the game from merely being a static, repetitive experience that will become outdated to one where the users’ creativity improves their experience over time. That makes Spore and games like it winners right out of the gate.
Unlike movies and music, games are the only type of media where the experience can be different every time you use it. That’s why people tend to spend more time playing games than they do using any other form of entertainment. Providing fun, interesting and innovative ways for gamers to interact with other gamers offers a huge potential for game developers to monetize those interaction above and beyond less interactive platforms.
As the premier investment firm focused on the game ecosystem, we are actively investing in innovative ideas like these. As we see the traditional US markets move toward a more online-business model – moving away from retail – we are seeing publishers and developers exploring alternative revenue models, game designs that support sharing of content and connectivity between game players. Spore and games like it represents an evolutionary step towards that and the potential to accelerate and fuel the growth of the overall interactive entertainment ecosystem - an area that GCube Ventures actively invests in.
