Spore to Ship 'When It's Done' And Not Before

Citing the sheer potential of the title, EA executives John Riccitiello and Frank Gibeau stated in a conference call yesterday that Spore will not ship until it is finished. Next Generation reports: "'It's one of those breakthrough products that might come across the industry every three, five, seven years ... We could not be more bullish for the potential of the franchise as we are right now,' said Riccitiello. He said that he still expects the game to ship in the 'March, April, May' 2008 timeframe. However, Riccitiello said, 'We will make the choice of shipping a better game than an on-time game given the high potential for this franchise.'"

Comments

Balancing act

[PieSquared]

Well, the delays for Spore are starting to get frustrating. On the other hand, after all these delays it better be a pretty freaking good game... which it won't be if they rush it to put an end to the delays.

Obviously no game is ever perfect, so it is up to the developers to decide the proper balance between time spent improving the game and delays before release.

That said, nobody wants another "Duke Nukem Forever." If you spend too much time on the whole "revolutionizing videogames" someone will take the lessons presented at all these talks Wright does and actually *finish* a game that heavily utilizes procedural generation or whatever before Spore comes out, and it won't be revolutionary anymore.

Here are a few

[Moraelin]

I wonder where I've heard this here "We'll ship it when it's finished" rhetoric before?

For example, from Epic, Blizzard, and a few others who are now the big names of the industry for it. It turns out that, surprise, more people buy a game which is finished and polished than something shoved out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline. Much as a couple of publishers still hope that if they believe the opposite really, really hard, it will somehow become reality.

Re:Translation:

[the dark hero]

"Spore will ship when it is actually fun to play, instead of feeling like a session of tweaking a very complicated spreadsheet." Then, why is Eve Online successful?

Re:Hypocrisy

[shish]

Everyone is always... Protip: the vast majority of generalisations are horribly flawed.

the SAME people are bitching Can you provide a list of usernames? I would think it far more likely that person A is bitching about one thing, and person B is bitching about another -- just because persons A and B visit the same website does not make them hypocrites for saying different things...

Spore is dead

[MobyDisk]

Most games must be done start to finish within 2 years. If you write a game and it takes 5 years, then the game is usually obsolete by the time it comes out. The longer the development cycle, the more difficult it is to target the hardware that will be available when you ship the game. And as the code base grows in complexity it becomes harder to maintain, test, fix bugs, etc. I think too many people say "Will Wright knows what he is doing!" and conclude everything will work out. But history shows that when a game is ambitious, overhyped, and delayed multiple times -- that the odds are not good.

I really hope Spore works out. But I think they may have become subject to high expectations and scope creep.

From The Man himself:

[El_Smack]

A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever. - Shigeru Miyamoto