A curious marketing strategy too. Following a press release issued last Friday by Electronic Arts, it appears that Spore, the life simulation from Maxis will be probably the first game to have not only a demo but a creation kit released far before the launching date for the full game.
The free demo version of the Spore Creature Creator will be available worldwide via download from
www.spore.com. The demo lets players shape, paint and play with an unlimited number of creatures, using 25 percent of the creature-making parts from Spore. Gamers can then share these creations with their friends, including seamless uploads to YouTube.
The demo will also be included in the The SimCity™ Box, which ships on June 23. A complete retail version of the Spore Creature Creator will also be available in North America for $9.99 and most European territories for €9.99, which gives players access to all the creature-making parts in the game.
So here's a novel idea where users will be able for free to create and share content for a game that would only be released two months later.
Maybe it is the occasion to introduce to you my dear friend "Acid" which is known in our little world to spread some nasty comments about a lot of topics (the guy is never happy with anything). And about this one, Acid has this to say:
Next time, they will give us the full SDK and we'll develop the damn game ourselves so they can sell it afterward without even paying us.Thanks for this interesting thought Acid, always a pleasure. On another note, we can notice that Electronic Arts seems as usual to not be quite familiar with the Dollar/Euro conversion nor the international banking system so for them, $1 = €1 which is their usual standard exchange rate. One advice: want to get a lot of money like EA? Do like them and hire a bunch of completely (but cleverly) incompetent accountants.
