Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

[Shawn Zipay]

Will Wright, the mind behind Spore and the entire Sims series, recently bared his creative soul to MTV Multiplayer.

One of the more interesting bits that he shared was the fact that he and the rest of the Spore team decided at one point that they'd rather have lower review scores and sell a ton of copies.

As wonderful as the content creation and sharing options are, the one consistent complaint I’ve seen is that the gameplay seems to have been “dumbed down” for the sake of appealing to a more casual audience. Was it?

“I’d say that’s quite accurate,” Wright told me. “We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. “Spore” has more depth than, let’s say, “The Sims” did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for “Sims 2″, which was around 90, and something like “Half-Life“, which was 97, and we decided — quite a while back — that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of “Sims 2″ than the Metacritic and sales of “Half-Life.”

If that sort of mentality seems backwards to you, you aren't the only one thinking that.

Source

[FPS[SONIC]]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

"I'd rather make more money..." is a very common decision.

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

I'm going to go ahead and toss in my own personal thoughts.

1. It just seems like he's coming off with the mentality that it's ok to lie to consumers. They showed one thing and then release a stripped down version of what they showed. With the trend in the Sims games, it's almost inevitable that some of these "removed" parts will appear as expansions of some sort.

2. Half-Life is still the top selling FPS of all time. It spawned one of the most popular multiplayer games of all time. It still has a metacritic score of 96, and Half-Life 2 also is holding steady at 96. Some of the most critically acclaimed titles of their time, that receive free content updates even years after their release.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a higher reviewed scoring title out there that receives constant free updates than one with lower review scores, content removed, and updates that consist of paid expansions.

From what I've seen, Spore has been getting slammed in the user reviews and not just because of the stupid DRM issue, but because it's just not all that great. I've read from multiple people that once the game is beat there's really no point in playing again as it all plays out the same despite differences in creture styles.

It just rather annoys me when developers are satisfied with mediocre work and gloat about how they know an unsuspecting public will lap up the product like that.

[AllFoamNoBeer]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

Corporations want money. Simple, but I quite believe they earned it, Spore is an excellent game, just needs ... some form of multiplayer.

[Lt.Hanley]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

Why does everybody feel that they need muiltiplayer? There is more to a game than muiltiplayer. Now maybe its me who hasnt played the game yet but some games are just single player experiences.

[MrChris_CJ]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

Typical of an EA driven project to go for money, but then again its true that they can make **** games and still get sales

its a pity Spore was dumbed down to the max, from being something that could have been truly brilliant to some cartoon style crap so it would sell to the Sims lovers

[Kradath]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

I don't think the game needs multiplayer that hard. In my opinion it's hard to tell if it is even a game and I don't mean that the negative way. It's like building your lego stones and then start playing with your creation, test how solid it is, do here and there some improvements and so on.

[iQue]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

Will Wright went lame after SimCity 4 (best simulator game ever!)

Cmon give us something good, Spore seemed like a good game but it lacks something... I'm not buying it yet.

[Spik3d]

Re: Spore Sales Are More Important Than Reviews

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a higher reviewed scoring title out there that receives constant free updates than one with lower review scores, content removed, and updates that consist of paid expansions.

Of course a gamer would want that.