Spore was officially launched yesterday, a couple of weeks ahead of the announced release date. That’s most likely because it had alread found its way onto every major BitTorrent site on the Internet last week, and Electronic Arts wanted to be sure they could sell one or two copies before the entire world had downloaded it for free. Even moreso once the word-of-mouth started making the rounds. Quite a few people are unimpressed, saying that the game is too easy and becomes reptitive quickly. That’ll drive off the hardcore gamers fast, and those are the people who usually buy the game the minute it hits the shelves. Here’s Wired’s review as an example of the typical complaints I have read so far today.

So they’ve made a gamble: let the hardcore people download it for free and get the negative w-o-m out of the way as quickly as possible so that the “casual gamer” market will still buy it a month or two months or six months down the road. Ever since the Nintendo Wii proved that you didn’t have to kiss gamer ass to sell gazillions of units, there’s been a lot of interest in ways to capture the imaginations of the people who don’t buy the latest-and-greatest hardware and games. Personally, I don’t know if Spore is the right game to be trying this tactic. The SimCity series of games is the ancestry of Spore, and SimCity was not a game one picked up casually. Will Wright’s team got lucky with The Sims as a simpler way to re-imagine some of the concepts behind SimCity, and Spore incorporates many of the ease-of-use UI elements they developed, but still involves a lot more commitment than making your Sim go pee every three hours.

A lot of the let-down comes from the sheer unsupportable hype that has been swirling around for years. From the now-famous videos of Will Wright demoing the game at an E3 convention almost four years ago, it seemed like he had really come up with the ultimate game, and nobody did anything to disspell that impression, particularly as the release date slipped further and further away. My guess is that the demos we saw in 2004 were of a game that was nearly ready to ship with much more complex gameplay, but changes in the world of video games compelled EA to push Maxis to make changes again and again to try to live up to the rise of social networks, lessons learned about the pitfalls of MMORPGs, and the new “casual gamer” model. So the game was probably dumbed down a couple of degrees, and the interactivity model changed up a bit, all without disrupting the hype surrounding the few details that would occasionally slip out.

Having pre-ordered my copy ages ago from Amazon, I am content to wait until I get mine in the mail about a week from now. I’ve been waiting this long, what’s another week? It’ll give me the chance to read everyone else’s reviews, gripes, and suggestions, and if there are any presently-unknown bugs, there’ll be the chance for someone to find and report them. A lot of people are particularly unhappy about the digital rights management scheme built into the game — the infamous SecuROM software. They’re talking about it over at Slashdot, which has a link to a story about how some gamers are giving the game bad ratings at Amazon to try to drive down sales because of their displeasure with the DRM. The inclusion of SecuROM is not new news, so I don’t know what people are in a dizzy about it now, and the necessary cracks are available right along with the game itself at the usual places. I’ll be downloading the crack at the first sign of trouble from SecuROM, I can tell you that much.

Based on the complexity and depth of the SimCity series, I was sure that once Spore came out I’d be holed up in my den all winter with it, but it’s looking like it will not be quite the timesink I originally expected. Even the whispered rumors of Civilization V say it’s more than a year away, and I am really in need of a replacement for CivIV for a while. Looks like Spore won’t keep me going that long, but I hope I get at least a few weekends’ entertainment out of it.