Maxis Launches Spore API Contest

Today EA Maxis announced the beginning of a development contest for their new Spore API. They're calling on players to submit useful and interesting apps and widgets, and they've provided samples to show the kinds of ideas they're looking for. The samples include an update list for creations by game buddies, a creature dueling app, a creature tournament app, and a variety of viewers.

Comments

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the game... but for programmers.

Let me guess.

[Anonymous Coward]

The apps that people submit will be subjected to the same "you can only install 3 times" crap that Spore had?

Re:Let me guess.

[LingNoi]

Nope in this case the apps people submit can be used for promotional purposes and the winners get their application's copyright taken from them by EA if they win all just for one graphics card..

Want the type of people who design mods?

[eieken]

First, take off all the DRM, and we'll talk.

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[LingNoi]

Awesome lets desig.. wa... what is this buried into the terms and conditions..

This Contest is only open to residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 13 years of age or older at time of entry and who had Internet access as of February 19, 2009.

Hey how come they don't mention that on the main page?

To be eligible to win, your app needs to display the text, "Download your own copy of the Spore Creature Creator now!" along with a link to http://www.spore.com./

Say what? Well then I'll just do my application for fun and not submit it.. oh wait!

By providing any Contest Assets for entrant's use Sponsor is granting entrants a limited, non-exclusive, non-commercial license to use the Contest Assets solely in connection with, and as a part of, the Contest. Entrants shall otherwise have no right, title or interest in or to any Contest Assets, and any use of the Contest Assets (including use of the entrant's Entry that contains Contest Assets) other than as permitted by these Official Rules may constitute copyright and/or trademark infringement.

Well at least they don't take my copyright if I win.. oh wait!

By entering the Contest and by accepting a prize, the Contest winners irrevocably assign and transfer to Sponsor any and all rights, title, and interest in and to the Entry (with respect to their Original Creations included as part of the Entry), including without limitation, all copyrights and a waiver of all moral rights in the Entry.

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[InsertWittyNameHere]

...and who had Internet access as of February 19, 2009.

We can't stress this requirement enough. If you got internet access after this date you're obviously not 1337 enough for this contest.

It's akin to being OG and having a low slashdot id#

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure thing Captain Obvious

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[sabt-pestnu]

They lose their rights to the entry if they accept the prize.

I wonder what Maxis would do if someone entered the contest, won, then refused the prize?

Particularly if the contestant was prepared to defend their rights...

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[Goaway]

By providing any Contest Assets for entrant's use Sponsor is granting entrants a limited, non-exclusive, non-commercial license to use the Contest Assets solely in connection with, and as a part of, the Contest. Entrants shall otherwise have no right, title or interest in or to any Contest Assets, and any use of the Contest Assets (including use of the entrant's Entry that contains Contest Assets) other than as permitted by these Official Rules may constitute copyright and/or trademark infringement.

What exactly is the problem with this?

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[4D6963]

Please mod this 'redundant'

Re:Want the type of people who design mods?

[djnforce9]

Right!! So instead of "paying" their in house developers to write new material for spore, they can sucker the mod community into doing it for free (or what is probably going to be a very pitiful prize not worth 1/10th the amount of money they would have made as a hired employee programming the same thing). That terms and conditions makes this blatantly obvious. If they really wanted more content, they would release the API to everyone who bought the game (just like Valve did with its Source SDK).

Desperate attempt at relevance.

[DreamsAreOkToo]

Will Wright thinks he's a great game designer. He is, but he's also very arrogant. Arrogant in that "George Lucas I shit gold" way. I think he never stopped to think about why The Sims was fun. I think he never stopped to think about why "Spore" wouldn't be a stellar success. Now, they're desperate to save it, without realizing that the fundamental design was flawed in a oh-so-not-re-playable way. It's a one time through shits and giggles 80% rating game. Go back to the drawing boards and make a new game. Don't forget to self examine to figure out why you failed/succeeded at your goals!

tl;dr Just because your last game sold a gazillion, cheap production, high return addons, does not mean your next game will as well!

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[MWoody]

To be entirely fair, it's possible this - and, indeed, a lot of the shit like DRM and the games' lack of content - is coming from EA and not Wright. Now, he could be faulted for being overly forgiving of their antics, but it's hard to get too angry at a man who manages to get ridiculous amounts of funding and advertising backing for unique (if sometimes flawed) games. My guess is he's off planning his next big thing, leaving Spore to EA and its programmers.

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Goldberg's Pants]

The problem is EA ripped the soul out of the game to pander to the mass market. From things I've read Wright is annoyed with what EA did to dumb the game down.

Game had huge potential. My seven year old son loves it. THAT is the market EA went for. The kids and the adults who like simple, boring games.

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm angry about Spore as much as anyone, but in defense of Wright, the game was dumbed down mostly because of one person (Chris Hecker) who decided the game wasn't cute enough and the science was too complex for the casual gamer.

http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/8555.page

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your link starts off with Will Wright explaining why that just isn't true. Anyway, it was just competing visions of a shitty game. Making Spore a little more scientific wouldn't have helped.

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read the entire thread, there is more info, and of course Wright is going to defend him, I don't think it would be in his character to make a scapegoat of his team, even if he had made mistakes.

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Gldm]

No, the problem is that EA made a game out of a tool. Granted they picked the best person possible for doing this (Will Wright), but the fact remains that Spore was an R&D testbed for next-generation user and procedural content generation systems, and not a game.

I'm pretty sure that Spore started off as the Creature Editor on someone's desktop at EA and they showed their boss how they'd made "3D Studio Max For 8-Year-Olds." Which granted is a phenomenal achievement. I'll gladly give them credit for making a tool that is an absolute triumph of technology overcoming complexity and making advanced computing accessible to the mainstream. But it's not a game.

So after seeing this fantastic tool, EA calls in "That guy who made the awesome tool-based games." i.e., Will Wright, and said "Ok we're going to throw an entire game worth of money at R&D on these new tools, because they'll let us make all our other games in the future far cheaper (and we can fire all the redundant texture artists and animators). But to justify it we need it to become a game. So your job is to make these tools into a game, so that users will buy it and beta test it before we use it seriously in a real game."

This is why Spore got delayed and delayed and delayed and "reworked because it just isn't fun according to testers." Wright basically promoted it as Sim Earth 2.0 and tossed in the rest of his bag of tricks and I would say did a reasonably good job at making a boring production tool into a fun game. But you can see the rough edges (city/civ stage is laughably simplistic for example) on it where the game was kinda pasted into the gaps between tools. And just to make people not feel cheated they were nice enough to throw an entire mediocre real game (the space stage a.k.a. Sim Earth 2.0: Sim Earth In Reverse) on top so it feels like you actually played something instead of just designing content for them.

So gee think I'm surprised that suddenly they're outsourcing the API interface testing to the mainstream as a "contest" too?

But to be fair, EA sees the production costs of games skyrocketing, and they knew something would have to be done sooner or later. That "something" is likely to be procedural asset generation and user content generation, and everyone in the industry knows that's where the time and money bottlenecks are, asset and content generation. So producing something like the modeling, texture, and animation systems Spore first means they're a generation ahead of their competitors.

P.S. I still love Spore, but I also still wish for a more technical Sim Earth 2.0. At least he was smart to put the hard part (terraforming) at the end this time instead of the beginning like it was in Sim Earth though.

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was all sad that we might have lost the genious behind games like SimCity and SimEarth. But you have made me happy, your comment gives me confidence that Spore was just a stepping stone for the next big SimWhatever game! Can't wait for it!

Re:Desperate attempt at relevance.

[Blibblob]

Hopefully his next big thing is SimCity. We've needed a new incarnation of that game for quite some time now. SimCity 4 still forced cardinal directions on us.

Space

[Meneth]

Get us more than one fleet of spaceships, then we'll talk.

Re:Space

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you don't enjoy being the only species in the galaxy inexplicably confined to a single space ship? But then you wouldn't have to personally crawl across your entire empire to sort out every single repetitive pirate attack, disaster or stubbed toe which is apparently the only thing to do in the entire space game.

Re:Space

[Anonymous Coward]

and > 5000 planets to conquer like master of orion3

Re:Space

[Like2Byte]

yup, the whole space phase is what made me stop playing. One fleet.

Oh noes! I'm being attacked 4 jumps away!
Ah, beat them down.
OK, the timer is getting low on delivering that species to the other planet 5 jumps away. Better get moving!
Ah, only 1 more planet to go. What!? I'm being attacked 7 jumps away. Grrr!
Ok, beat them down...now how much . What!? Timer's expired! dammit!!
{klaxon} oh! What now for cripes sake? Being attacked 4 jumps away? Yeah, good luck with that.
ALT-F4.

Spore is an abysmal failure as far as I'm concerned. Was cute for about 2 days...then it simply jumped the genetically-engineered shark.

Only for people in USA

[Racemaniac]

anyone care to explain why only people from the USA are allowed to participate? in this day and age, what could possibly be the motivation for that? the 10$ they'd have to pay extra to send tha prize a bit further away?
i'm wondering on how many original ideas they'll be missing out by excluding so many people...

Re:Only for people in USA

[Anonymous Coward]

because people in EU have better copyright protection where you can't steal their application under the ruse of a "contest".

Re:Only for people in USA

[(H)elix1]

Every country has their own special sets of law. Saw this when the shop I worked at branched out from the US to EMEA. Every country we sold into, or even better - opened an office - had a unique set of laws. Learned some hard lessons by not using 'native' lawyers. When we did they were not cheap. This was just a contest, right?

Legal worries

[Leafheart]

If they open the contest for anyone outside the US they are open to have a bunch of lawyers to deal with all the rules for contest on these other countries. The protections the participants have, and the rules they can or cannot apply.

Any type of contest that deals with money, need to be confined to a small subset of countries where you, as the company doing it, have the ability and knowledge of the legal system. And have representatives that can protect you from any lawsuit that my arise there. Be it from the participants, or the Government.

Design is not law

[AnalogyShark]

Just like most other games whose sole claim to fame is a writer/writer team that was overhyped from previous games (John Romero - Daikatana, The Original Diablo Team - Hellgate London, Richard Gariott - Tabula Rasa) this game was doomed to fail. Just because you did something right once, doesn't mean you can do it again. Sequels are usually almost always worse than the original.
I don't even consider games, where the main selling factor is that the creator created something else I enjoyed, for purchase anymore. I mean, a game should sell itself, not the guy who thought of it.

Re:Design is not law

[spyrochaete]

I don't get your point at all. Designers who led very successful projects are destined to write one project that will fail? Or are you saying all Wright's future projects will fail because his name is well known?

Also, are you saying Spore's sole claim to fame was its designer's name? That's not true in my case - the premise (if not the execution) stood on its own merits.

Re:Design is not law

[SirAdelaide]

Except that Sid games are generally good.

Bleh Spore = boring

[jweller13]

Bleh, I found Spore to be mostly hype after I played it. It has about zero re-play value.

Whoever

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up whoever added the tag 'pleasemakeourgamefun'!