| photo by James Gooding
The Hook Of Life: Spore players can evolve creatures from unicellular blobs to empire builders. | screenshot: courtesy of Electronic Arts (scene)
The Sims alone has sold 100 million copies, worth about $4 billion. What's the value of your SimEmpire?
I guess it depends on who is asking [laughs]. I think it would depend on if you were talking purely financial terms or social terms. If you're just thinking financial terms ... oh, God. Well, typically you'd estimate the long-term revenue potential. What are the margins like? You would apply some multiple to it, look a few years in the future with a discount -- a few years, 5, 10 at the most. So I think you would apply several billion dollars of valuation on the expectation that you could recoup that over several more years with high margins, if you're talking about the entire Sims brand. That's the way I would look at it from a financial point of view.
That's a complicated point of view.
Yeah, I try not to think that way.
You once wrote an essay about how games would one day learn what we like and adapt. Do you still see that as the future?
There has been this thing for a while now called DDA -- dynamic difficulty adjustment -- that adjusts the difficulty of the game based on players' abilities. But now we can actually start changing the themes, the underlying story lines, the goal structure, all sorts of things. That's far and away the most interesting part, because games are really about players having personal experiences.
Do you think the technology is at the point where you can do any idea you have?
I don't think technology is a limitation at all. At this point, it's purely about cool design. Nothing is out of bounds.
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