Project Spark

» see projectspark.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Microsoft announced Project Spark at E3 in June 2013 with a live demo where somebody sculpted a hillside in front of an audience and then dropped a creature onto it. That was the pitch and the pitch was honest. It was a game whose content was a toolkit: terrain brushes, a visual logic system built out of when-do statements, a library of props and characters, and a way to publish what you made so other people could play it.

Team Dakota built it inside Microsoft with SkyBox Labs, and it shipped through an unusually long public runway. Windows open beta in December 2013, Xbox One beta in March 2014, then full release on 7 October 2014 in North America and the following week in Europe. The launch model was free-to-play with paid content packs, which is the model Microsoft picked for a product whose actual users were unpaid volunteer creators. That tension never got resolved.

In September 2015 Microsoft gave up on charging. Every piece of downloadable content became free on 5 October 2015 and eligible buyers were refunded, with the whole thing relabeled as open creation. What went unsaid at the time is that the studio had also stopped making things: the remaining episodes of Conker's Big Reunion, the one piece of first-party content anybody outside the community cared about, were quietly cancelled with the story unfinished.

The announcement came on 13 May 2016. Development was over, the game was pulled from the Windows Store and the Xbox store the same day, and online services would run until August. They did. On 12 August 2016 the servers went off and the entire published catalog, every level anybody had uploaded in two and a half years, stopped being reachable.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The toolset was genuinely good. The logic system let a person with no programming background build working enemy behavior in an afternoon, and the community built platformers and puzzle rooms out of parts that had been shipped for a fantasy adventure. What it never got was a reason to keep coming back. A creation tool needs an audience for the creations, and the Xbox One install base in 2015 was not browsing user-made levels.

Microsoft has tried this several times and the outcome does not vary much. XNA Game Studio put a compiler in the hands of hobbyists and was discontinued in 2013, taking the Xbox Live Indie Games channel down with it eventually. Project Spark had the bigger budget and the shorter life.

~ the conker problem ~

Conker's Big Reunion was the first chapter of a new story for a Rare character last seen properly in 2001, released as Project Spark content in April 2015. It ended on a hook. The other chapters were being made when Microsoft stopped funding the game, and they were never finished or released, so the sequel to Conker's Bad Fur Day exists as one episode that leads nowhere. The people who bought in for that were refunded in October 2015, ten months before the servers went off.

~ what you keep ~

Project Spark is the clearest case I know of a product where the file on your disk survives and the thing you made does not. The editor still runs offline on a Windows machine that has it installed. You can build a level today. What you cannot do is give it to anybody, because the upload endpoint has been dead since August 2016 and there is no third-party server to point the client at.

I write software for a living, so the pitch here was always aimed past me. What I recognize is the shape of the failure, which is one everyone who has ever put work into somebody else's platform can read at a glance: the creation was yours and the distribution was theirs, and only one of those two needed to be switched off.

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