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Spore Delayed Until Q2 2008
georgewilliamherbert writes "CNet has the news that EA is reporting a slight loss for the quarter. It expects profits for the year to fall short about ten cents, hitting a high of $1.20 as opposed to the expected $1.31. The company's share price was down 3% in extended trading yesterday. The reason for these adjustments? EA reluctantly announced that Spore has been delayed until Q2 2008. ' Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts said it taken out Spore, a game where players build organisms from scratch, from its financial projections for the fiscal year ending in March 2008, adding that the game could be delayed until fiscal 2009. In the fourth quarter ended March 31, the company said its net loss widened to $25 million, or 8 cents per share, from $16 million, or 5 cents, in the year-earlier period. Excluding items, the company earned 6 cents per share versus 14 cents in the year-earlier period.'" From a technology perspective, this thing seems at least as complicated as some Massive games; makes perfect sense it would take about as long to build this title as a game in that genre.
The main Spore code is on schedule and almost complete, its just that they wanted to include Duke Nukem Forever as a side mission.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Man, this game is great! Wow! ... Ok, it's delayed. Ok, another delay. Hm, ok, that preview doesn't look as impressive as it once did. Man, this game isn't really all that good.
Comment of the year
By the time this comes out it will have become a full-fledged fern...
Also - insert DNF joke
Help test the
Hopefully this extra time will allow them to release Spore on more than just the PC at launch. Will Wright has said he wants to port this game to as many platforms as possible, and I'm praying for a simultaneous OS X release.
At least this gives me another year to find a throw-away laptop capable of running the thing... Somehow I don't think a RagePro Mobile would cut it.
Will Wright is dead. They're just delaying the game because they don't want to upset anyone. It's like Weekend At Bernie's, but not funny anymore.
..I guess that makes it more like Weekend At Bernie's 2.
Blerg.
They're probably "just" having some problem getting the actual game into the code base.
is the programmers got a DMCA take down notice for code within the game. Seem that someone emailed the MPAA, letting them know that all species in Spore are created in hex. Guess they took offense to highly aggressive baboons and HD-DVD sharing 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
I hate EA, why must they torture me so! now i have to find something to suck up my life until next year ...maybe i should take up WoW...
Perhaps someone should design a game where the object is to successfully produce a game. You would have to manage artists, programmers, marketers, and get it finished before your stock price drops, your bussiness fails, and you become the next Duke Nuken Forever joke.
Spore seems fairly entertaining when you have a comedian play it. Robbin Willians
I don't understand why everyone is so hyped for Spore. It seems like it's just the sims but you can make creatures. Maybe I just don't buy the marketing about evolurionary traits or whatever, but spore looks like another person/animal raising sim which will have set paths no matter wgat they claim.
I like muppets.
Perhaps if Will Wright stopped appearing at every single games/computers/electronics conference, he would have more time to finish the game.
Seriously, though: EA seems to think that Spore is such a unique game that it will sell no matter when it is released. I'm not sure about this. Plenty of companies are working on creating more dynamic and procedural content for games, such as the NaturalMotion software for simulating the human body. If EA/Wright keep postponing it, Spore will not feel like the quantum leap it was supposed to be.
BTW, what is the record on longest development time for a game? In Q2 08, Spore will be just shy of a decade. IMO, anything Will Wright has spent nearly a decade on has to be truly awesome.
They can delay the game as long as they want. I have always had good experiences with Wil Wright games, and I trust that when Spore finally does release it will be as polished and tested as possible. They're delaying it in order to release the best game possible. If they didn't, we'd be complaining about an incomplete, buggy game, and we would finally see a patch to instate full functionality... oh, around Q2 2008. Either that, or they're all just playing Spore so much that they can't get any work done.
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
You can't cut back on funding! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!!!
*pSig = NULL;
They must be adding support for Duke Nukem life forms and Duke Nukem environments.
Crap. I wanted to play this so badly. Guess I should forget all about it and think as if it had been some bizarre dream, because when games start getting delayed over and over they are never released. By the time the game's ready, it'll have 3 competing games and outdated art, so they need to improve the engine and redo the art, and there you go again, another delay.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Does anyone actually care? I have seen dozens of interviews and previews about Spore but have yet to meet one person who is actually excited about the game. From everything I have gathered its just another twist on the digital sandbox idea. This reminds me of the Hype when Maxis was creating Sim Life and Sim Earth, they pushed the crap out of it but in the end they were scientifically brilliant but just werent fun to play.
I remember when I first heard about this game, I was just getting out of highschool and me and my buddies were reading about it thinking this game will be so cool. Now I'm in the working world, I'm done university, getting married and my highschool friends are all doing the same. A pitty they didnt release it when I would have time to play it.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Damn you Honest Harry, for drawing the heat on me, and making me work from a smaller office!
Once you leave your mother's basement and discover that females do exist in other forms than internet porn and men pretending to be women in chat rooms, you might begin to understand. Until then, AC, there is little other help I can offer you.
I see all these people saying that the developers are playing Spore instead of working on it. Since Spore is supposed to transmit your successful creature designs into a grand central database to seed other people's games with, does that mean that they could fly under the radar by playing the game to build the release content?
PHB: "You're way behind. What have you been spending you're time on the last X weeks?"
Developer: "I've...uh...been busily creating end user content! In fact, added another 12 species last week!"
PHB: "Oh, that sounds like progress. Carry on."
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
I think I'll just stick with Flow. It's basically the same thing.
"She lives with me!"
Hurry up and cough up a decent next-gen installment of SSX, EA. What are you idiots doing.
At what point do we start demanding that game companies keep their mouths shut about games until they are X % done? Like say 95%. Or Beta or something. I've been disappointed by delays in this game one too many times. That's it Spore, you're off my "Games to Watch For" list.
So sad.
It expects profits for the year to fall short about ten cents, hitting a high of $1.20 as opposed to the expected $1.31.
Even I manage to make more than $1.31 profit in a year. They're clearly just not trying. On the positive side, perhaps they can make up the difference with a quick hoover down the back of the sofa.
I don't know why it isn't being released in stages. I'm sure the idea has been floated once a month, or maybe once an afternoon. I've always had trouble accepting that a game this large and ill-defined can be completed in one fell swoop. If nothing else, maybe they could release one or two "preview" games as a kind of public beta test.
THis is what is really happening.
THey are going online.
Why just gouge people 80 bucks for a game when you can get over 240 bucks a year on an online mmorpg?
SPore looks okay........
but if it goes online. hell no.
I want star trek online.
The other theory why spore is delayed : People can't program. At least not americans. Send it to Japan.
THAT is the place to get computer girly games. mmmm....nice ag2.
Where is the North american version? hmmm......thank goodness for open source translations.
Now if you can create a race of submissive females in spore that would be funny.
and naked. mmm....good ferengi morales.
Looks like someone's never paid attention to some of the things EA's recently acquired, nor to older games that had advertisement for other games when you QUIT the game (Apogee and Epic Megagames come to mind!) instead of while you're playing the game. And I don't want ads in-game, If I see a billboard that advertises coke, and it fits, fine, they paid to have it there. But if it changes, that poses a potential security risk if you have to connect to the net to get new ads. I can imagine with all the code that there's SOME flaw that'd alow someone to be able to toss a malicious ad in-game to fuck your system up while you're too busy playing and not watching your system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
One can only hope EA dies a brutal death at the hands of the stock market. I take this as a sign of things to come. I'm also waiting for Spore, it is the one game I am actually looking forward to. I knew the usual EA shenanigans would get in the way.