In an interview with Gamasutra, EA Chief Executive Officer William Gordon made it clear how important Spore is to EA – very, very important. From the interview:

Q: How important do you see Spore being to EA’s future?

A: WG: If it’s as big as The Sims, [it will be very important]. The Sims gave us a three-year financial lift and created a new division for us. The Sims is as important for us as Madden or FIFA, so one of those is always good.

It’s the hardest thing that anyone at EA has ever tried, by a lot. Even for somebody like Will Wright, there’s so many moving parts that it’s hard for him to fully imagine the end result. For two decades, we’ve made games where we could mostly imagine the end result before we started, but in Spore, we ended up imagining the possibility space and then designing within it for a long time.

With Spore, we’re trying to learn how to take socialization and customization in games to the next level, where customization starts having animation, not just meshes and textures. We’re trying to cover new content in various kinds of evolution. We’re trying to figure out new ways to make mini-products in the game. When we did The Sims for the first time, we strictly tried to make it a massive single-player [experience]. Customizing everything was new. There’s the photo album feature that turned out to be wildly important. That got invented at beta.

Spore has more innovations than The Sims did. So, Spore is important because it might create a new division for EA, but for sure what it’s doing is getting our feet wet in trying to do a Web 2.0 game.

Spore, as we all know, is a very complicated game. It may look simple on the outside, but the mechanics of things like the editors take skill – and lots of time and money – to create. Clearly though, EA is banking on all that hard work paying off!

Q: Is it going to take a lot for Spore to become profitable, given the million-year development time?

A: WG: Yeah, it needs to sell in the millions and last a few years to pay back the investment. But you know, we were probably going to spend the money on something. It might as well be on Spore!

Thanks to Jirnsum for the tip!