how ironic... a game about evolution suffering such darwinian fate...

i´d laugh if it wasn´t so sad...

I think this drop in uploads should not be unexpected, but on this level, may indicate a future problem.

Any game of this type with uploads done by the community, will show a huge influx of users at first who eagerly jumps into the fray of playing and creating stuff.

After the excitement of the whole experience wears off, people move on to other new and exciting games. Only the fanbase remains behind joined by new players, or players that slowly trickle back over time. The release of new expansions could draw in new players and some back as in Sims 2, but your baseline of the number of active players is always those people that stick to a game, remains active in the community, and will most probably keep uploading and creating.

Looking at the current graphs, it does not really predict the direction the up-loaders base will go, but I suppose that it may indeed hit rock bottom even with the new expansion, as content created with C&C can only be downloaded by other users who has the same expansion pack installed. They may gain a few new users but the fanbase, who most of seem not to be interested in buying the expansion pack anyway, will eventually leave because their is nothing new to offer them. Bar all the 'politics' on this forum, the gameplay issues, questionable creation rating system and features list - with no way to connect to your creations in the space stage in the game, what does all the new content help if it is simply muddy textures or specks on the horizon?

What needs to happen for that bar to gradually rise to the top again, is for EA and Maxis to pull up their bootstraps and offer us much more than they are giving now.

Great job on an analysis. I figured the creations would drop. I mean there were so many bugs with the game that people just decided to quit. C&C will get some players creating more and the expansion will get some more players overall.

I was kind of surprised they showed those stats. They confirm that spore is dying a Quick death. Too bad it had great potential.

I still am having fun with the creator, but have no intention of buying C&C pack next week.

This week WoW players get Wrath of Lich King and next week LotRO players get Mines of Moria. I will be in the latter, and likely not look back.

Hopefully EA/Maxis will get their act together to get some reasonably priced additions to Spore to make buying Spore more attractive. With a $20 parts pack with 60 pieces more pieced (compared to 400 in main game) and a $30 cartoon creator that does nothing outside what MS Paint can do. I feel like I should go "Mooo.." before buying them.

Just after the Creature creator launch, we had an influx of uploaded creations.

so they are impressed that when they allowed people to make creatures for the first time....they more creatures made, than before you could make them?


WOW!!!! that is sporing amazing!!!

I "lol'd" when I read it all.

Nice analysis. Everyone expected the numbers to die down a bit. However, according to the stats released by Maxis, the game is doing a nosedive. It's in free-fall here and is much worse than I bet they were even expecting. Initially I was surprised at these findings, but the more I think about it the more understandable they are. There's absolutely nothing to sweeten the deal or make people want to continue to play Spore. I'm sure there will be a little spike around Christmas and with the release of the new parts pack, but things are all downhill from here.

I know I've given up hope in this game. I haven't even played 50 hours yet I've had enough of it. I still randomly browse this forum once in a while when I get really bored and have nothing better to do. Most of the time I do have much better things to do though. Spore simply cannot stand up to all the competition out there. I was hoping Maxis would throw Spore owners some free content or at least another patch, but there's been nothing. I see no reason to want to play Spore. The impending release of the parts pack and comic creator seals the deal because I, like a lot of people, don't want to be spending money every couple weeks to keep a game current. In this harsh economic times it's more prudent to spend money on deeper, more entertaining and fulfilling experiences.

It's sad because Spore could have and should have been so much more.

Well, naturally the uploads drop after a few weeks. Everyone has seen the game, has played it a few times, has created lots of stuff in the editors, and now they return to their other games. The same happends to me: in the days after I buy a new game I mostly play that game. But after a while, I start playing other games again because I've seen everything in the game by then.

Maybe we should see this as a chance instead of a doomsday prophecy: this will hopefully mean the general quality of creations goes up. I have too many buildings consisting out of 3 unpainted bricks in my Sporepedia >_<

Could this just be a trend of current players actually playing the game rather than just creating Creatures and et al.

I know that personally I've been concentrating on better creatures, buildings and vehicles now. When I first started playing I just wanted to move on quickly and keep playing. Now I'm actually concentrating on quality.

If it was a matter of players playing rather than creating then why are the achievement number so pathetic?

R.I.P, SPORE.

Thanks for taking a critical interest in our new stats page.

We have settled down from nearly 2 million assets uploaded per day at launch to around 200,000 today. It's expected that the rate of creations published would steady out after the games' release.

While we encourage your picking our stats apart, and deriving your own graphs, we want to point out that your derived graph isn't entirely accurate.

Your derivative indicates that we peaked at nearly 12 million uploads per day back in September. If we were really uploading 12 million per day, in 4 days we would have had 48 million assets - more than the total we've collected from Creature Creator launch up until the present!

We've posted a new stat today that shows a similarly themed graph with more accurate data.
http://www.spore.com/stats/

If there are other types of statistics you're interested in, let us know. We'd like to hear your feedback.

Thanks,
MaxisCactus.

Thanks for the new graph, while interesting that it shows the weekend spikes, the trend is still not good. It will be interesting the bump next week with the C&C.

I, and like speak for many, really want Spore to do great. I am not a fan of SecureROM, DRM, or the price of C&C pack, but the concept of the game is great, just hoping for more to do within it.

Ascus wrote:Thanks for the new graph, while interesting that it shows the weekend spikes, the trend is still not good.

The XFIRE statistics for Spore also show weekend spikes. And it also shows a general trend of decreasing gameplay. Solitare now gets more gameplay by XFIRE players than Spore does.