Comment by thaumasiotes

The comment I pointed you at answers all of this, but you haven't commented on that, so here it is line by line.

>Spore has some 3D modeling tools

The tools are the least interesting part. The mechanism has a name: Maxis called it the "Pollinated Content System", and Caryl Shaw's job title was "Pollinated Content Producer". What she ran was a server, a database schema, and a matching algorithm that decided which content your galaxy should receive.

The transport isn't a modeling tool either. Creatures compressed to about 3KB, and every piece of content shipped as a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image. You could email a creature. The picture was the data.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/gdc-i-spore-i-p...

>And other people can find your models, and you can find theirs.

No. That is precisely what Spore did not do, and the difference is the subject of my comment. Nobody finds anything. The server builds a model of your aesthetic and requests content to match it:

>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.

https://www.popsci.com/entertainment-gaming/article/2007-02/...

Chaim Gingold: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you go find things on a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. "You can find theirs" describes the version Spore replaced.

Placement is the hard part, and it is the part you skipped.

>So if we recognize that the "gameplay" part of Spore never worked...

I said so first, in the comment you replied to: the editor, the sharing system and the community were "the most innovative and successful things about Spore. (As contrasted with the not as well realized gameplay and storytelling design goals.)" We agree on the premise and disagree on what follows.

>we're left with Second Life

We are left with its opposite, because you deleted the property that separates them. Spore is asynchronous: other people's content injected into your private world by a server that picks it and places it, with nobody else in there. Second Life is synchronous: one shared persistent world, land you buy, placement you do by hand.

You can't reach Second Life by removing a feature. You have to add back the one thing Will designed out, and he gave the reason: "without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up."

Second Life is the control group for the placement problem. Same ingredient, opposite architecture.

>a much, much older thing

2003 versus 2008: that's just five years, hardly "much, much older". The genuinely much older ancestors are Lucasfilm's Habitat in 1986 and LambdaMOO in 1990 for shared worlds, and NetHack bones files and The Sims Exchange in 2000 for pollination. My point is that you and other people keep forgetting or never knew the full history.

>this doesn't look like it's making any new observations

My comment's third paragraph says this mechanism has been "reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name." Telling me it's old is agreement filed as objection, making my point for me.

The observations in there: the matching and placement layer is the invention, not the editor. Curation comes free, because download counts rank quality better than a designer can, since thousands of people each pick for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. And this keeps dying because nobody is paid to own it.

>abysmal gameplay that could never persuade anyone to start up a game of Spore

One million copies and 25 million uploaded creations in the first 17 days. 100 million creations by May 2009, averaging 307,000 a day, 31,017,761 of them creatures, more than 19 times the number of known species on Earth. Two million copies in three weeks; EEDAR put lifetime sales near 2.8 million, or 3.2 million counting the Creature Creator.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251207022405/https://ir.ea.com...

Spore's TTP (Time To Penis) was negative. The Spore team coined the term, and Chaim optimized the tools so well that it went negative: players, testers and "children" were building and sharing penis-shaped creature monsters during the pre-release beta phase, before the Creature Creator was even officially launched to the public. The first public use of the term was Margaret Robertson's GDC 2009 talk "SPORE's Wake: What Seriously Happened?", at 38:00, and Engadget wrote it up the same day:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1317/

https://web.archive.org/web/20191115084555/https://www.engad...

It then got referenced several times in the hilarious series that parodies a game development company, "Mythic Quest":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xqyIMwbew

And the Creature Creator shipped standalone for $10 in June 2008, three months before the game: an editor sold as a product with no gameplay attached, which had over three million creatures uploaded before the game existed. One million of those came in its first week. At E3 that July, Will noted that fans had created 1,589,000 creatures in about 18 days, the same as the number of known species on Earth, and put that at doing God's work at 38% efficiency.

This is the same playbook we used before for The Sims which was released in 2000: I implemented the character animation system, pipeline, and a standalone tool called SimShow, which we released in 1999, before the game was released, that enabled players to create their own skins. So just like Spore, there was already lots of user created content for The Sims on the day it was released.

https://www.geocities.ws/shayla_jade/simshow.html

Here's a more recent reimagination of SimShow that runs in the browser:

https://vitamoo.space/

>This tutorial is to help familiarize you with using Sim Show and it's uses. "Sim Show" is used to help preview the skins you've made for your sims.

Then After The Sims was released, I published The Sims Transmogrifier to enable players to create their own objects:

https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument...

>What Transmogrifier Is: Transmogrifier is simple tool that enables many people to create their own content for The Sims. Like SimShow, it is limited in scope, so that it's easy to use. Transmogrifier lets you edit the text of the catalog product description, change the price, and most importantly it exports and imports all of the sprite images, so you can edit them with paint programs like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

Your separation of editor from game is right, and it runs the opposite way from your conclusion. The mechanism stood up without the gameplay. The gameplay is what needed carrying.

>It hasn't been much of a success.

620,000 monthly actives as of December 2025. A $650 million a year internal economy. Linden Lab has spent $1.3 billion building it and paid about $1.1 billion to creators, keeping 10% and giving creators 90%. Spend per active user around $190 a year against Roblox's $12. Average resident tenure about 14 years. 23 years old, still running, and investors have never taken money out.

https://gamesbeat.com/linden-lab-has-spent-1-3b-building-sec...

Call that unimpressive if you like, but look at what it does to your argument. You say stripping the gameplay off Spore leaves Second Life. If it leaves a 23-year-old platform that has paid a billion dollars to the people who make the content, the stripped version is the part that works. Which is what I said.

The right inference from "great editor, weak game" is not that the editor is worthless. It's run it again with a good game. People did. Super Mario Maker: 7.2 million courses by May 2016, played over 600 million times, on 3.5 million units sold, and roughly 68.6 million courses uploaded across its life. Then LittleBigPlanet, Dreams, Animal Crossing dream addresses, Drivatars, Steam Workshop. This model has never failed because players didn't want to make or share things.

It fails the same way every time, and those two make my point rather than yours. Mario Maker's online services went offline in April 2024. LittleBigPlanet 3's servers were pulled in January 2024 "temporarily," then kept off indefinitely that April, wiping 16 years of player levels with no warning:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/22/24137357/sony-is-abruptly...

Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone. Spore's servers are somehow still up. Cheap to build, expensive to maintain, no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block. "The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.

That's the argument. It was never about the modeling tools.

See my other comment here -- I even made a prediction!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636721