Thanks goes to the Corvus for putting Twenty Sided's note on his reader about the tragically bad Spore reviews mounting on Amazon. Over 400 one stars so far? That's an ouchie even by the widly unscientific standards that comprise Amazon ratings.
The vast majority of them? Complaining about DRM. That's not exactly a good story when Wired calls your game kinda boring.
The only person I know in RL who has played the game said it was pretty good, but I'll be honest ... a game with this much hype? I expected to be awashed in Spore Love by now.
Update: Joystiq points out that DRM slam party aside, the title is #1 on Amazon's charts. So I'm guessing no, right now there aren't a lot of execs worrying they overhyped the product.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Is Spore Day A Flop?
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5 comments:
Indeed. Normally the push back on games with this much hype doesn't start until about a week later when the glow wears off.
My concern is that if Spore is failing to produce an immediate glow, after EA gave Wil so much free rein and money, that the entire industry is going to become even more entrenched in the "safe funding" pattern that has throttled innovation for so long.
It's a good point. I mean, I would hope that instead a company might think to themselves "Maybe we shouldn't starting hyping this game until we have a game to hype" - but that's not the world we live in.
Sadly, they're only going to think, "How can we convince our shareholders that this won't happen to us?"
And that type of thinking doesn't tend to lead good places.
Someone at work told me that the Amazon score was a semi-organized effort. I don't know if it's true, but the result regardless is pretty bad for Spore.
That would not surprise me at all, Brin. The anti-DRM crowd has a pretty decent following and this would clearly be a way to publicize the notion.
I'm not a fan of DRM, but unless the DRM is causing lockups, crashes, etc., I can't say it would warrant a massive one star onslaught. It warrants being critical, for sure, but let the punishment fit the crime.
I'm curious about the online Mac distro and whether it has any of this crap.
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