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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.
That has actually been done and is called GameTycoon http://www.gametycoon.de/ (site is in german) A review can be found here: http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/gametycoon/revi ew.html
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.
It's been shown that you can shape the main body of your creature however you want, only the mouth, feet, hands, etc. are pre-made pieces, and you can place them wherever you like. And there's 30+ of each to choose from, not to mention the whole automatic animation and texturing system.
If you don't believe me just go look on youtube for the videos from the various E3 and GDC demos.