Introducing Spore to the Mainstream

EA’s evolution game drops in four days and the expectations are high. Colin Sebastian, Lazard Capital Markets senior VP, says that he expects Spore to sell 2 million units in September.

EA is betting on the gaming industry’s hot new girlfriend, the casual audience. To build buzz for the game (and to entice causal and hard core gamers alike) EA released Creature Creator, a free, downloadable ‘demo’ that allows anyone to create their own creature and upload it to a shareable database known as Sporepedia. Over 2 million people downloaded it after it’s release in June, so expectation that it’ll move 2 million units this month isn’t far fetched.

Blitzing the Mainstream

The people of New York were taken with the splashy images of prostitutes that appeared ahead of Grand Theft Auto 4’s release. The imagery tempted self-identified gamers and non-gamers alike to take a look and play around the gritty world of Liberty City. The makers of Spore are also hoping to capture the imaginations of the mainstream with murals and ads that aim to launch the Spore universe into our pop culture lexicon. The ads are yet another example of video games infiltrating public spaces to nudge their way into mainstream discussion.

Oh Look! Celebrities like Spore too!

Sporevote.com is a gallery that displays a smorgasbord of celebs and some folks you’ve never heard of sporting their Spore creations. I think the gallery ranks how many views each personality/creature receives on the site. So far Philip of the Philip DeFranco show is leading the pack with 113, 140 likes and 137,207 views. You’ll also find Stan Lee and Masi Oka’s creations. Check out Sporevote for more.

But … Where are the Girls?

To its credit SporeVote features a couple of well known women who played the game and showed off theircreature creating chops. Some of the women featured include Melissa Joan Hart, Margaret Cho and Katy Perry. But of the 63 celebrities featured only 11of them are women. I appreciate the effort but it’s not enough. According to the International Game Developers Association, women represent 40 percent of all gamers. The Entertainment Software Association cites a similar number at 38 percent. They also found that the average female gamer plays games 7.4 hours per week. We’re gaming addicts too!

Spore has the potential to engage a ton of female players. It would’ve been awesome to see more women represent on SporeVote. Ideally that number should be around 25. I guess you could call it a ‘female gamer’ quota. And if you did, I wouldn’t care. The industry could benefit from more women in ads and in-game.

Overall, I think Spore is doing a good job of reaching out to the mainstream audience. We’ll see who ends up dropping 50 bucks on the game: The hardcore set, the casual folks or a nice mixture of the two. Who do you think will end up getting the game?

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Have you seen any Spore ads on a billboard, sidewalk or dark alley near you? If so, send them over to bukola [at] mspixel [dot] com and I’ll add them to this post.