Microsoft kills project Spark | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft kills project Spark

forums.projectspark.com

57 pointsfenesiistvan24 comments

For anyone else: it was a game creation toolkit http://welcome.projectspark.com

Go watch the first video - imagine UE4 or Unity but way easier. Everything from world building to AI. Would have been really cool for teenagers to make stuff with, as you can get good results really quickly. You don't even need a PC or a keyboard.

Looks really cool, I wish Unity's UI builder was as intuitive.

Is there anything that comes close to this in scope/quality for any other platform?

Oh man, no wonder this sounded familiar! This is the thing my older brother was playing all the time a year or two ago on his Xbox 250 or whatever. He's got a PS now though so I imagine he doesn't play it much anymore anyway. He was like "hey look, this is programming just like what you do!" and yeah I could see some similarities. It was kind of neat I suppose.

should re-use the domain as Projects Park , a graveyard for some nice ideas, they could put their wi-fi mesh research in there too :(

And it's not open sourced, because they don't want to cannibalize their next idea.

But it's not open sourced, so no one wants to take a risk on getting frozen out of their next failed idea.

They were demo'ing this at E3 in 2013. Launched 2014.

Total project public life: about 2 years.

Oof. I feel bad for anyone whom invested heavily in that one.

Not the first time MSFT is taking the difficult decision to kill a project.

I'm more disappointed that by killing it, they've fully killed the one chance Conker had of getting a decent new game after Conker's Bad Fur Day on the Nintendo 64. Okay, they technically killed that late last year when Conker's Big Reunion was cancelled, but still. No more Project Spark = not even a chance of development resuming on it. It also means the fan project to recreate Pocket Tales in 3D in Project Spark looks to be dead too.

No, Young Conker is not a good alternative. As the thousands of dislikes and hugely negative coverage proves.

But yeah, it's a shame. Looked like a good engine for making games and game worlds, and possibly a good way for companies to bring back retro characters and franchises as part of episodic campaigns.

My kids tried really hard to play it - it was super complicated and worst of all - way too slow! Otherwise, they kinda liked it.

Too bad. Maybe these types of projects need to contain a full great game along with the builder portion so more copies will get out there.

Damn, I was hoping to try it at some point.

I was wondering about this ever since MS bought Mojang, really.

Yet another case that makes me wish consoles had no Internet connectivity.

The retirement of a game that functions by receiving content from other users through internet connectivity isn't a clear example of why consoles shouldn't be online. It's an example of an experience that couldn't be had if consoles weren't online.

If the game was self-contained and wasn't defined by features requiring connectivity, unplugging the console from the internet would leave it playable.

It would be a bad thing if consoles only operated while connected.

Unfortunately, half the point of Project Spark was collaborative game editing and sharing of user-created content. They could've avoided turning down Spark by not having that feature, but arguably, that'd mean they never turned _up_ Spark in the first place.

A game engine with no way to share games isn't very interesting.

Perhaps you mean "wish consoles did not require connectivity to a central server"? Because peer-to-peer would mean things like this could continue working despite discontinued support.

Good point.. in the old days, Internet connectivity was expensive so a lot of games supported LAN-based multiplayer. Those were awesome days. You could certainly achieve the same with the Internet today if you didn't have a central server.

Shame. Maybe they will open source it so it can be ported to a less obscure platform.

What would you consider a "less obscure platform" than Windows and XBox One?

Android, iOS, Blackberry OS10... Pretty much everything? Each has orders of magnitude more users than XBox.

You're comparing mobile devices to an Xbox? Not really the same use case... at all.

Well, yeah, if the Xbox was usable I'm sure it wouldn't be so obscure. Which doesn't change the guys premise that if they opened sourced it, it could be ported to a less obscure platform.

Are you using "obscure" in the sense of "closed" and "proprietary"? Or are you using it as "relatively unknown"?

Im using it in the sense of "Relatively small userbase.", whereby a "less obscure platform" is any potential gaming platform with a larger userbase.

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