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Brief
The aim of the website was primarily to promote game sales, but was also intended to be a crucial part of the Spore experience. User-created content is central to the game, and the brief specified that this content should be available to view, download, and interact with in various ways across the site. These 'Community' aspects were intended to maintain the site's popularity long after the game's initial launch. The site also needed to be available in multiple languages due to the worldwide release of the game.
Strategy
To meet EA’s objectives, Lightmaker created a site powered by EA's Phosworks CMS, which allows territories to update content such as their homepage, graphics, news, screenshots and movies, as well as being able to extend the site with additional dynamic pages. A free download of the Creature Creator is available, giving users a small taste of the Spore experience, and allowing them to experience the interactive areas of the website. These interactive areas pull data from the Spore game servers, allowing website users to browse the 'Sporepedia' and ‘Sporecasts’ and to keep track of 'My Spore' whilst interacting with other users through comments, ratings, buddies and more. In addition, the site is fully tagged using Omniture tracking technology, providing EA with detailed information on site visits. All of the user-generated creatures on the site can easily be imported into the user’s own game, which has helped to ensure the long-term popularity of the website.
Execution
Lightmaker liaised with Electronic Arts and Maxis in order to determine the overall strategy and branding of the website, as well as how best to utilise in-game data on the website. This relationship continues, and all parties are still in frequent contact in order to maintain Spore's success.
The website itself was developed using Coldfusion 8, with embedded Adobe Flash Player 10 elements. These include an interactive Christmas feature, which made full use of inverse kinematics to showcase several featured Spore creatures. To implement interaction with the game servers, Lightmaker integrated with an SDK in order to pull game data to the site, but also to allow users to make changes which would be reflected in-game. EA's Phosworks CMS is widely used to act as a centralised hub for management of key game titles, and this was selected to allow territories to control content on the Spore website. In this instance, Lightmaker developed functionality to allow territory administrators to use Phosworks in order to create news and page content, update three tiers of navigation, and to update screenshots and video amongst other content. This has allowed the site to be kept fresh and relevant with content including tutorials, tips, and FAQs being added post-launch after demand from fans.
Results
• Since launching the Spore Creature Creator in June 2008, Spore fans have created and uploaded 100 Million creations including creatures, vehicles and buildings (actual figure stands at 104,802,309 as of 2nd June 2009)
• An average of more than 306,000 creations submitted daily to the Sporepedia™, the Spore library of user-generated content.
• The 100 Million represents a variety of uploaded creations including 31,017,761 Spore creatures, more than 19 times the number of known species on Earth.
• EEDAR, a game market research firm, estimates that Spore sales have hit 2.8 million worldwide. The figure hits about 3.2 million if you count the Spore Creature Creator, a $10 game that includes only the creature creation function. (4th May 2009)
• The success of Spore has so far spawned the 'Creepy and Cute' parts pack, the upcoming 'Galactic Adventures' expansion pack, and 'Spore Hero' for Wii and Nintendo DS.
• Spore has won several awards, including IGN's Mobile Game of the Year (for Spore Origins), IGN's Best Family Game, and Best Artistic Design. The website itself has been nominated for a prestigious New Media Age Effectiveness Award within the entertainment category
• The site was featured as a "Hottest Google search" in September 2008.
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