The answer to last week’s question: I’m crazy.

Okay, I might not be, but the data isn’t going to back me up, here. (Last week, I said “I have a hypothesis that there’s a generation gap here, as well as a number of people unaccustomed to MMOs and DRM in general.”)

First, let’s check out the age curve:

This chart is an age breakdown of Spore players who have also registered at GamerDNA. Our age spread goes from 12 to 52, but statistically speaking, there weren’t enough people over 43 to show up. Also, Gamer DNA technically only allows you to join if you are 13 or older. If you’re over 18, here at GamerDNA we have a secret room filled with naked women handing out drinks. Hey, don’t ask me, that’s straight from our community manager, Sam.

But I digress. Let’s look at the data. That sweet spot (from a marketing perspective) of 18-27 has a whopping 48% of the Spore players. The earlier half of that decade has a little more of the weight, with 27% versus 21% for the second half of the cohort. The biggest spike on the chart is with 18 year old players, although the richest chunk is right in the middle of the group: the 23/24 year olds.  (By the way, 13% of Spore players are aged 28-32. Gaming as a hobby is not being abandoned as the players age, and this will eventually be recognized by the market. More rated M games, please!)

iTunes launched in 2001. Seven percent of all Spore players were in the fifth grade when the idea of “licensing” instead of “owning” a digital track was introduced to the marketplace.

Okay, I deliberately made that sound dramatic just to horrify some of our more sensitive readers. To be fair, iTunes didn’t come out for Windows (and therefore was not a mass market phenomenon) until 2003. It is still fair to say that the iTunes model of content distribution and sales is something that 48% of Spore players take for granted. When you take this demographic factoid in concert with the fact that most users (GamerDNA comment writers notwithstanding ) install a game once on one computer, I can see why EA did not think the limitations would be such a big deal.

However, the cynical side of me also notes that Googling “remove itunes DRM” turns up about one gazillion results. The demographic cohort that takes the licensing scheme for granted has been publishing ways around the limitations for as long as the technology has existed… and using the internet to share that information as widely as possible. Could it be that the outrage was in part due to the fact that no easy workaround is available?

But my theory – that Spore players skewed a bit older than the 18-24 bracket, and therefore the customers were protesting something taken for granted by younger players, is dead as a doornail.

So, let’s see how my other theory pans out. I thought perhaps Spore players are by and large NOT MMO players, and therefore are unused to restrictions and questions of ownership. Here’s the chart of the games Spore players also enjoy:

The data is taken from GamerDNA members, and therefore skews a bit to the MMO population.

Given that many people came to GamerDNA for the purposes of organizing their guilds and clans for WoW and GW, I’m going to suggest that we can just toss out the WoW and GW results. The rest of the graph will give us the real differentiators.

One of the first columns I did talked about the games that WoW players liked. 41% had Counterstrike, 35% played Battlefield 2, 26% played COD4, and 26% played Oblivion. These numbers were not terribly different for Guild Wars players (45/39/28/30). If we just look at those four titles for our Spore players, we get 55/43/45/48. Now, that tells me two things. First, Spore players are gamers in the broadest sense of the word, as opposed to MMO players who happen to enjoy other games. That is to say, Spore players own and enjoy a variety of other titles in greater numbers than our members who identify themselves as primarily MMO players.

Second, Spore players are far more interested in free form gaming. This accounts for the presence of all the MMO titles, even allowing for the sample bias of GamerDNA originating as an MMO destination site. But look at the Oblivion numbers – 48% of all Spore players have Oblivion in their list of played games. That was the most sandbox-like of all the RPGs to come out in recent memory. The real tell-tale for the free form, sandbox style of play is Garry’s Mod, with nearly a third of all Spore users having this in their played list. This nifty toy (go to YouTube and Google, and kiss the next hour of your life goodbye) hasn’t shown up on any of the “also played” lists that we’ve run in this space. It’s not just on this list, it’s a major title.

So! I was totally wrong. Spore players are perfectly accustomed to MMOs due to the sandbox appeal, and are therefore familiar with the vagaries of content ownership and licensing agreements. The differences come in their motivations and approaches. The makers of the next big sandbox would do well to study these differences, and advertise accordingly.