“Spore’s biggest issues was that the play at each stage was fairly shallow because the team was making five games at once. (At one point, Will described each of the game’s five stages as light versions of classics – cell is like Pac-Man, creature is Diablo, tribe is Populous, civilization is Civilization, and space is Masters of Orion.) However, making five different games at once is a bad idea; making one good game is usually hard enough.

“Each of the five stages had different controls, different interfaces, different nouns, different verbs, different goals, and so on. Some effort was made, of course, to share ideas and elements across stages; however, the compromises involved often watered down what was supposed to make each stage distinct in the first place.

“For example, each stage required a friendly means of engaging with other entities; in the creature stage, this mechanic became dancing for other creatures to make friends while, in the civilization stage, this mechanic translated into attacking other cities with music instead of bullets.

“Neither mechanic was the best idea for its own individual stage, and the justification was high-level consistency. Thus, the powers of ten idea put the team in a state of perpetual compromise where every major decision had to be considered according to its effect across all five stages.”

Spore was more remembered for the controversial DRM it introduced that landed publisher EA in plenty of hot water, and till this day, it’s not quite the classic it could’ve been. What are your thoughts on the game? Do you have fond memories of Spore? Let us know in the comments below.

“That’s something that I’ve always believed in — getting the players very involved not just after the game ships, but even before and try to listen to them. The kind of games I’m interested in, and actually the way games are going, is they’re becoming far more baseline communities of people playing the game and doing a lot of cool stuff peer-to-peer, whether it’s content sharing or competition or forming social connections.

“I tend to think of the fan base, especially the hardcore fan base, as co-developers. These people with a passion for your project are going to go out and sell your game to other people and pull other people in. The more they feel like they have some ownership over the process and they’re not just kind of customers, the better.”

Of course, Wright is full of praise for Microsoft for actually bothering to listen to fans. “To see a company like Microsoft actually sit back, listen, and understand the fans and respond to them is impressive. For a company that size to be that responsive is great. These companies are the ones that obviously keep us in business and allow us to make games.”

But what if the people complaining online doesn’t really account for the millions and millions of people who don’t browse internet forums or take part in Twitter campaigns for no DRM? As Wright points out, “On the other side there’s the Internet thing where 5 percent of the people are making all the noise. Sometimes they represent the other 95 percent, sometimes they don’t.

“A lot of times the 5 percent are asking for ridiculously elaborate features, and as a game designer you know that’s going to make the game inaccessible to everybody else.

“There are these people that want you to push a franchise in a super hardcore direction, and therefore we’re going to close it off to 95 percent of the players, so you have to understand what kind of feedback that they’re giving you. But when it’s something that’s 5 percent representing the other 95 percent that will probably feel the same way, then I think it’s really valuable.”

“I think we have an extremely powerful medium here at our disposal, and I think we’ve only realized a small fraction of its potential. It wouldn’t take too many things to really impact a lot of people. Relative to what we have as a medium, with what we could be doing with it, we’re falling way short.”

However, when he looks at the major innovations happening with smaller developers, he notes “it’s much, much more healthy than it was ten years ago, when it was a few large publishers controlling ten million dollar purse-strings.”

“I remember ten years ago at every E3 you’d walk around asking your friends ‘What’s new?…’ ‘nothing,nothing,nothing,'” Wright noted. “Now, every week somebody tells me about some weird little app that came out.

“Not big budget, but they’re interesting and fun out of the box. It’s a much more level playing field, I think. They are putting marketing dollars behind these things, but still it’s not five big publishers controlling ten titles a year.”

Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Need for Speed, Madden…did we miss anything? Regardless, the number of smaller titles, newer titles coming up is definitely much better now than 5 years ago – thanks largely in part to efforts from mobile app developers and crowd-funded projects.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Will Wright, who created SimCity and founded Maxis before moving on to his new start-up Stupid Fun Club, stated that, “I feel bad for the team. I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot.

“It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,’. That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”

Of course, the situation has since improved but it hasn’t left anyone more comfortable with an always-online game.

“I still find the mouse to be one of best input devices ever made but it’s not very comfortable for the living room environment. I think that addressing the inputs would be one of the few things I would look at from the technology side.”

But surely new control schemes like the DualShock 4 for the PS4, with the new touchscreen and lightbar, would present some remedies? “Yeah, I mean stuff like that might not be one solution for a number of different things,” states Wright.

“I feel like the amount of data that we have coming out of these games with the rendering and the visuals is tremendous now, and it’s improved thousand-fold from when games started. But the input going back into the computer has only just barely crept up a little bit, in terms of the number of bytes we’re inputting back into the game.”

While “emotional” input looks the way to go, Wright believes that “it’s probably going to be a hybrid of all these things and probably a lot of it is going to end up being on the software side.”

However, when questioned about consoles not “being the center of the universe any more”, Wright answered:

I think all the console guys are running scared. Not so much because of the hardware, but because of the business models, free-to-play and that kind of thing, have shifted underneath them.

About Maxis’s next title, Wright hopes to reach gamers across various strata. And that’ll be possible with a multiplatform effort.

It’s a multi-platform strategy, definitely. I don’t want to be committed to any one platform – I want to be accessible on a variety of platforms.

Click here for the full interview.

Will Wright is the creator of Spore and Sims and he has said that Sony and Microsoft are running scared because traditional business models are in a decline due to the emergence of solid competition from cloud gaming, free-to-play and the likes which he expects will change the industry.

“I think all the console guys are running scared. Not so much because of the hardware, but because of the business models, free-to-play and that kind of thing, have shifted underneath them. Wright said he expects cloud gaming will rise to prominence because people will want to be able to access a game regardless of which device they’re using, and that this will eventually reach a “much broader group of players” than dedicated gaming hardware,” he told GamesIndustry.

“It adds more opportunities, too. You have a lot of people who are able to do a lot with small teams and low costs. It used to be big companies doing triple-A titles on consoles is where all the money is. It’s shaken things up quite a bit with all these platforms. In some sense all the little mammals – small developers, new companies – have an opportunity right now to fill new niches that are expanding rapidly.

“They might be small opportunities now, but they very well could be huge opportunities in the not-too-distant future.”

I agree with him somewhat but this will not happen any time sooner because for the business models to change it will take a lot of time and effort along with fast adoption of the alternatives.