How to screw over your own customers in one simple step:

1. Be EA.

The Spore DRM debacle is a mess EA has created for itself.

Do not fuck over your paying customers. Especially do not fuck over your customers under the excuse that you're trying to stop piracy. You're not punishing the pirates, you're just giving piracy a wider margin by reducing your legit players.

As if we needed any more reasons to dislike EA. Sheesh. Do they not realize this actually affects player spending habits? There are several people in my guild where WAR was the first EA product they've begrudgingly bought in years. And they did so only after Mythic took the EA out of EA-Mythic.

There are piles of game boxes on my shelf and notably the majority are not EA games.

If there was any question over whether they might abuse their DRM-schemes, it's now been answered. You don't ban players from your game over their legit questions and complaints on your forums. You just don't. Especially when their complaints are specifically that you're holding too much power over a product they've purchased. /facepalm.

This kind of heavy-handed nonsense towards their customers has serious impact on their sales and brandname identity, don't they get that?

Dumbasses.

Spore had the potential to go huge and instead it's just gone big. It's no slouch, but with its pedigree, EA could be raking in a lot more dough. Shareholders, take note, because ultimately CEO John Riccitiello is responsible, hold him to it. Errors like this significantly reduce potential, plus the fodder he's handed the pirates: It's achieved the exact opposite of what EA was going for.

If anyone is wondering why the games industry isn't as bulletproof in the economy as it should be, it's nonsense like this. Consumers don't need another excuse NOT to buy a product right now.

Oh yeah, this post adds to my negative-parental filters I'm sure. =)

All of the examinations over WoW's success gets pretty tedious at times. Some people are still baffled by it, many have mistakenly taken it as everything Blizzard does is golden. It makes me weep for the designs of future games, because the WoW-cloning (and itself a clone of EQ) is going to get tired really fast.

Want to know the real secret? I'm not just rambling here, flat out I'm completely positive this is the very core of WoW's breakthrough mass-market success:

WoW was the first MMORPG that wasn't ugly.

That's it. All of it. Right there. Go ahead, list a bunch of other features, they're important too and some of them no doubt keep people playing, but that reason right above is the only one that matters when it comes to explaining how WoW captured such a huge audience in the first place.

The MMORPG genre was all set to take off, it had since before it's conception, virtual worlds are a blessed idea straight from the gods themselves. It didn't have to be done right, that's bonkers, it just needed to be pretty. I'm painting with broad strokes, there are parts of other MMORPGs that were nice to look at, but they've been horribly inconsistent in their styles until WoW. Blizzard's art direction was notable at a glance.

Never underestimate the ability for screenshots to sell a game.

Presentation is everything.

I didn't come up with these tenets, they've been widely known since the dawn of videogames and probably could have been theorized before they existed. We're a visually obsessed species. Sure, gameplay is king once the game is in the hands of the gamers, but in order for gameplay to sell games a namebrand needs reputation first. Blizzard had that too mind you, but seriously, it wouldn't have sold a tenth as much if it was as ugly as EverQuest.

I'm thinking the same thing with Spore. A few months back, I was wondering if it may flop even after all the hype and press. Then the creature creator came out and there's no doubt to me that Spore will be a runaway success, because you can't make a creature that isn't cute. Even the phallic ones. Damn cute.

It even affects why we leave one game for another. I had all sorts of gameplay beefs with WoW after 3 years of Blizzard's blandification of their best property, but in the end the main reason I left for Age of Conan? I was sick of staring at elves, dwarves and orcs. Evem the best graphics can feel shallow after a long while and I've had my fill of WoW's cartoonish style.

Feel free to keep debating the gameplay features tho. =)

Spore has been labelled as the first MSPOG (Massively Single-Player Online Game) or MSPM (Massively Single-Player Metaverse). You can clearly see the word Massive in there, which supposes that it will compete directly with the MMO market.

It's being hailed as the quintessential blend of casual and hardcore gaming appeal, but will it really be that big?

I'm going to step out on the plank to predict that while Spore will achieve critical excellence, it won't do as well as Maxis' Sims games. That's an easy prediction really, I mean geez the Sims games & expansions have pretty much held a top 10 sales position since their first release in 2000. Expectations to top that are not likely to be met, seriously.

I hope Spore does really well though, but I'm still having troubles picturing how much I'd want to play it. I enjoy a good sandbox game now and then, but for me even, Spore seems a little too esoteric sandbox. I also have difficulties relating to non-human entities. Call it a lack of experience but I just don't put much caring into strange three-tentacled beasties.

Penny Arcade's early take on Spore pretty much summed it up.

As for being "first" in the single-player metaverse type stuff-- Plenty of games (including all of The Sims) have toyed with players sharing data online, this doesn't seem that much of a stretch more, perhaps just refined.

Maybe Spore will shake some players out of their WoW obsessions, but I think it's more likely a parallel market than a competing one.