Building Community around
Pollinated Content
Upload your creature and send him on
an epic journey into the SPORE Community
What is this thing called Content?
• Buildings & Lots
• Sims
• Stories/Movies
by the way, these aren’t to scale….
Pollinated huh? what?
• What it isn’t:
– P2P
– MMORPG
– modding
• What it is (sorta):
– Asynchronous sharing of stuff you made in
your game with your pals or a total stranger
• The benefits of not having a zillion
simultaneous connections to your server
You show me yours
and I’ll show you mine
• The Sims 2 Community is prolific!
– 12K Movies and 50K Stories
– 430K Sims uploaded by 55K users from over
170 countries
– 280K Lots uploaded by 64K users
• Make the creators famous and give them
a place to share their creations!
Taking it to the next level
• Share the best content automatically
and in the background
• Provide an integrated space for users
to share their game experiences
Content Pollination
Server
Player
Computer
Ecosystem
Player creature
Pollination #2
Server
Player
Computer
Buy Mode
++
The Massively Solo Player Game
Combat
Other players download your creatures and compete
with them for ultimate survival in their game
Cooperative
As other players play the Space game, your
creatures participate in alliances and
become even more connected
Missions
Your uploaded creatures become the game
pieces of other player’s missions in the Space
game
Shared Experience
Share your best creations with a group of your friends and
have their content automatically fill your Spore galaxy.
Our town
(or tribe, or city, or planet….)
• Fan site webmasters
• Community Leaders
• Artists
• Storytellers
• Why should you want to have a
strong community?
The Maxis Way
• How we’ve done it
– tools, websites and knowing your audience
– open(ish) communication between
developers and community
– make it easy. make it fun.
Make the users do the work
Sims1
Make a Date!
Sims2
The Body Shop and
getting in the game
SC4
The Terrain
Generator
and
the BAT
Screenshot of
Creature Editor
will go here
The Internet brings us all together
• Pick the stuff you like
and connect with others
or
• Connect with others to
get the stuff you like
A needle in a haystack…
or should I say an amoeba in a galaxy?
• How are you going to find
stuff in Spore?
–
–
–
–
Buddy Lists
Style Groups
Collaborative Filtering
Store, find, sort, annotate
Bring it all together, by bringing it
all together
• Creators
• Consumers
• Gamers
• Community Leaders
• All served by the pollinated system –
one system, many solutions, one
community
Go ahead…
• Ask me anything
and no… I don’t know when we’re shipping…