Speaking as part of a conference call which followed the unveiling of financial results for the first quarter of the year, Electronic Arts top man John Riccitiello talked a bit about Spore and about how his company needed to treat this game carefully in its effort to establish a new franchise that would rival even Sims, the most successful videogame property ever created by a company, which has sold over 100 million games overall in its lifetime so far.

Citing official figures Riccitiello said that the Spore Creature Creator, which was released about a month ago, has been so far downloaded more than 2,5 million times. The CEO would not say how many people actually paid for the Creature Creator but most of the downloads are likely to have been free. Even if the game sports a sci-fi inspired theme, that of taking a single cell life form on a journey that will end on galactic domination, women felt the Creature Creator was interesting and one third of the downloads were made by women gamers.

Riccitiello said that "job one with Spore is to make the launch successful" and to make sure that people receive exactly what they expected for the game. He admitted that the title had a great potential of creating a franchise to rival The Sims, but, in his own words, "it's a little bit like pool, if we spend way too much time setting up the second shot, we miss the first shot" so there will be a couple of years before the future of Spore is clear and we will know whether we will have a separate Spore label at Electronic Arts.

In the meantime, it's very likely that Spore will get a Sims Store like outlet from where gamers will be able to get new creatures, new creature parts and other content for the game.