Got to play with Project Spark today. The technology behind it is quite impressive and I am very intrigued by the ability of this game to teach the fundamentals of logic-based coding and elementary computer science. It certainly has the potential to be much more ground breaking in terms of edutainment than Little Big Planet was based on the mechanisms by which the creator has to edit and interact with the content.
That having been said...
JESUS TITTY FUCKING CHRIST!! Microsoft has gone completely apeshit with "microtransactions" for this game. It is as if the creators of the title came up with this amazing procedural based content creation and sandbox toy system and then some executive fresh off a Farmville bender went "so how much money can we charge for each prop / effect / control / tool in the game???!?".
"Playing" the game, which in this context means going through content creation tutorials as well as running through content created by other people and generating your own content, gains you Coins which you can use to buy some rudimentary props but the cost of these props seem somewhat high as in "play for a couple hours and you can afford to unlock a different colored staff to put into games you create". For the big things like different lighting schemes, different NPC and PC models, different palette sets etc you have to spend "Tokens" which are about on par with the cost of old Microsoft points in the Xbox 360 era.
Not only do you need to pay to unlock these things as a creator, but as a player you are only allowed 30 mins of Sparktime a day. What is Sparktime? This is the time you are allowed to play content created by others that contains any object, effect, color etc that you do not yourself own. Now you can, of course, add additional Sparktime to your account... for a moderate donation of $$$. It looked like a monthly fee of $30 gave you bonus experience and also unlimited Sparktime which seems more than a little steep.
I went from being very impressed with the demo to soul-crushingly depressed as soon as I saw the shop. Now the game is obviously still far from primetime and I may be totally off base in my opinion based on what may be placeholder costs, but if not then I fear the game is going to either be painfully expensive or really only accessible using least common denominator assets such that the largest possible pool of players can actually play your level.
