Long Awaited Spore Launch: Customer-Created Content and Protests via Amazon!

I wrote about the evolutionary computer game called Spore as the ultimate example of designing a business strategy around customer-created content in Outside Innovation in 2006. Remember that Spore is Will Wright’s (designer of Sims and Sims City) epiphany. After watching how much time, effort, and creativity Sims users put in to the design of their characters’ clothing, wallpaper, furniture, and other paraphernalia, Will Wright decided to create a gaming environment in which the entire object of the game is to create your own world—starting with single celled organisms and moving through five stages—cell, creature, tribe, civilization, galaxy. You play Spore on your own computer or game console. There are also stages of the game (like creating creatures) that you can do on hand-held devices, like the Apple iPhone.

A Spore Creature designed by Sander Miller, Garrett Miller and Sophie Lance, inspired by their lobster dinner!

There are many “gamers” who will never like Spore. It is not a procedural game, e.g., one in which there are challenges that you need to figure out and master in order to win. Nor is it a game in which you need to recruit 50 strangers to join your league in order to beat the other guys. It is also not a multi-player game. You play by yourself, creating your own creatures and your own civilization, but you can reuse creatures created by others. Some early players have called it tedious and boring. Others are intrigued by the “open-ended” environment that Spore offers.

The Good News: Customers Are Creating MILLIONS of Creatures and Sharing Them

My grandkids LOVE creating creatures with the Spore Creature Creator. “Spore is truly a revolution in gaming,” my veteran gamer stepson, Tod Hagan, told me. “This is much more creative than any other game.” Tod is a Linux, open source, technology-savvy geek in his 40s. Tod is also a doting uncle. He brought Spore’s Creature Creator to each of his nieces and nephews and loaded it onto my Mac so we could all take turns creating Creatures. The age range of our young creature creators is three years old to eight years old. And, I can tell you that it was tough to pry the kids away from the computer to do more mundane things like go sailing, swimming, or blueberry picking. They loved creating creatures!  

Spore creatures created by Trillery, Dave, and Sarah

What makes this activity so much fun is that, as you assemble and mold your creature, adding legs, arms, mouths, and other appendages, your 3D creature comes to life, and you can make it dance, roar, laugh, have babies (no sex act required), and move around. You can animate a routine and automagically capture it as a YouTube video. It’s great fun, and if a three-year old can do it with a minimum of coaching, the rest of us may be able to figure it out. I realize that many of the full game capabilities may not be appropriate for the younger set, but we adults can certainly enjoy creating our own little worlds, and the youngsters can share their creatures happily with each other and begin to populate worlds with creatures from friends and family as well as others’ creatures they come across and want to use or modify.

20 Million Creatures and Rising Daily. Electronic Arts launched the Spore Creature Creator last spring in order to prime the pump. It’s a free download from the Spore site. They expected several hundred thousand creatures to be created. Instead, 20 million creatures sprang forth! And these are just the ones we know about! (You can create creatures using Creature Creator on your own system, but they’re only registered and uploaded into the Sporepedia when you register online. I’ve only uploaded a handful of the couple of dozen we created in a couple of days.)

The Bad News: Gamers Take Exception to Spore’s Three-Install Limit and DRM

Given the enthusiasm with which my family embraced the Spore Creature Creator, I was eagerly anticipating the launch of the full Spore gaming platform this week. (And yes, I have bought mine, but haven’t yet received my download and registration key). However, the launch hype has been overshadowed by a protest of sorts. Gamers have taken violent exception to the Digital Rights Management (DRM) that Electronic Arts has embedded in the game as well as the “you can install this copy only three times on one or several computers” mandate. Michael Santo, Editor of Real Tech News, explains in his post Spore's DRM Panned on Amazon.com why Spore attracted over 600 1-star ratings on Amazon.com in a day, lowering the product’s overall rating to 1 out of 5 stars:

“But it’s not because of the game; it’s because of the DRM. Spore uses SecuROM, the nearly universally hated PC game copy protection system. Many claim that SecuROM uses “rootkit” technology, commonly used by malware (and Sony!), to hide files from the user, and that uninstalling the game leaves SecuROM garbage lying around.

Of course, the aim of the reviewers is a) to warn buyers of SecuROM being in the game, since it’s not on the box; and b) teach (?) EA a lesson by lowering the rating so far no one buys it.”

Many gamers apparently feel that this DRM is a draconian measure that is being taken by Electronic Arts. They don’t want to have to call to ask for permission to do additional installs (either because they rebuilt their systems, or because they have more than three computers they use). They don’t like having “malware” on their system. They want to buy, not “rent,” their games, and to be able to play them years later. These dissidents all point to the fact that the real rip-off artists have already hacked the DRM code and posted Spore on the pirate download Web sites, so EA is inconveniencing its paying customers when the horse is already out of the proverbial barn.

It’s too bad that EA wasn’t able to come up with a customer-friendlier approach to protecting its intellectual property, particularly for a game that is designed to take advantage of customers’ creativity.

Using Amazon Ratings as a Protest Vehicle. What I found most intriguing about the Spore backlash was the particular way in which the gaming community voiced their protests. In addition to bad mouthing Spore within the gaming community discussion groups, they took their protest to a more visible place and virtually picketed Spore’s listing on Amazon.com’s retail site by posting low ratings and complaining about the DRM policies. This is very savvy e-protesting. And it’s the kind of customer behavior that every product manager and CEO fears the most.

It will be very interesting to watch Electronic Arts’ reaction to the customer protest about the DRM that EA chose to implement. (By the way, there’s also an interesting backlash against Spore among the Creationists—fundamentalist Christians who do not believe in evolution.) For my part, Spore looks like a great platform for the human species to figure out new ways of getting along while advancing civilization.

Comments

[Malcolm Wicks]

It is somewhat ironic that a game which is all about development, grow and spreading around the world is embroiled in making it difficult for people to play.

It seems to me that the developers are totally product centric and do not understand what customers really value. With a better understanding of what customer value I'm sure that new and original ways for the developers to make money will appear. Its obvious that they can not win with their current ways of operating.

[Patty Seybold]

Thanks, Christian,
I agree that EA (and other gaming companies) have a LOT to learn about how to handle this issue. I find it really sad that the people who were most enthusiastic about SPORE pre-launch now refuse to buy it!

[Christian Olsson]

This is a terrible story for 2 parties - legitimate users who simply wanted to play Spore and couldn't because the activation servers went down and EA because Spore was cracked even before it was released.

Often developers walk a tightrope with the tradeoff between protection strength and the degree of impact on legitimate users but this was a failure on both dimensions! Is this really what the publisher wants to 'accomplish'? Why not use a solution which is friendly to honest users, has no impact on development time and the strongest available protection against crackers - see the whitepaper "Is Anti-Piracy/DRM the Cure or the Disease for PC Games?" which can be downloaded here www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf.

[Bardo N. Nelgen]

It seems, that (despite the described hassle for the users) the mass-customization industries are really picking this up as a testbed on how to successfully mash up their own services with other customizable experiences.

Already got your favourite SPORE character on a customizable t-shirt (or mum's apron) ?

EU: http://spore.spreadshirt.net/en/GB/Shop
US: http://www.zazzle.com/sporestore

Disclaimer: I'm currently an employee to spreadshirt.net. ;-)