Too Good to Fail?

I saw an interesting item on line this week regarding the highly-anticipated and massively hyped computer game “Spore” – developed by Maxis, the creative team behind the wildly-popular “Sims” games and published by Electronic Arts, one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. For those non-geeks in the audience, Spore allows the player to create his or her own life-forms, combining various shapes and design elements as desired to produce almost anything you’d like. Once you’ve designed your creature, you can have it evolve into a sentient – and eventually star-faring – race, which must then colonize other worlds and solve various puzzles. Released to enormous fanfare, Spore was supposed to become the most successful video game ever, bigger than “Sim City,” bigger than “Pac-Man,” bigger than “Leprechaun”…

Okay, in fairness, nobody in North American ever heard of “Leprechaun,” unless you frequented a little-known video arcade in Isla Vista, California in 1985, where a lot of obscure video games went to die. But Spore was actually expected to be huge; according to this article on Yahoo News the game was supposed to sell at least two or three million copies in its first year. Yet, in almost a year and a half, the game has sold less than 1 million copies, and is still not running away with the market as it was expected to, despite the introduction of new add-on features. It’s certainly not a failure; when you include the iPhone and other mobile versions it has sold nearly 4 million copies world-wide. But the original software – the original heart of the business model – is still not the hit it was supposed to be. It’s worth asking why not…

The commentator on Yahoo blames the disappointing results on an over-hyped product (something that couldn’t help but disappoint customers when they got it, since NOTHING could have lived up to the pre-release hype Spore got) and a lack of focus – the game is too complex to appeal to the casual user, but not complex (or exciting) enough to appeal to the power gamers who made up its key audience. It’s certainly not a faulty product, having made back much more than the cost of developing it, but it appears to have missed both ends of its potential customer pool by trying to play to the requirements of both groups – and that isn’t always possible…

Which is, of course, why I am calling the situation to your attention. The idea of a product with mass appeal – a comic book that can win mainstream book awards; an animated film that can win best picture; a mass-produced hamburger that can win restaurant awards – these are the ultimate goal of every new product development team in the world. The problem is, without a clear customer base to market to, a new product has no way of actually gaining traction. In this particular case, while the Spore concept is certainly interesting, it doesn’t compete well with the high-quality, immersive narrative games that have become the standard for console gaming in recent years. Eventually the user is going to get tired of creating fantastic beasties and want to move on to a game challenge – and this is where the Spore program fell down, with unimaginative (and repetitive) game play and no clear story line to follow. Compared to a realistic simulation of modern warfare, or a heroic quest to destroy evil and return the rightful king to his throne, or even the antics of two beloved arcade characters finally getting their due, it just doesn’t stack up…

So before you release your next product, ask yourself: Does this product really have what it takes to gain and hold the projected market share? Or are we just convinced that it’s going to be a success because it has so much going for it that it MUST be too good to fail?