Spore producer Caryl Shaw had a session at GDC earlier today entitled “Fulfilling the Massively-Single Player Promise – How’d We Do?”.  In the session, Shaw quickly changed the session’s title as not many people showed up (due to Suda 51′S presentation across the hall) to talk about the online development for Spore as well as her cat, Cheese.  (I adore kitties!)

She shares her mistake of buying the servers for Spore too early in 2005 when the online aspects started to kick off.  By the time of the game’s release, the servers aged a little, but it didn’t cause any conflicts.  In fact, Caryl goes on to tell how it benefited the team with time to do load testing so the Sporepedia wouldn’t crash.

Besides sharing her story, she also listed the stats of how well Spore’s online community is performing:

89,505,660 total uploads since June
1.5-2m uploads per week (1m per day the first week)
2.6m registered users
3500 new users a day
500-600k uniques a month to Spore.com
4.45 minutes (average time per visit)
5 – number of Web Engineers at Maxis (plus Ernie, the part-time database guy)

Source:  Kotaku

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