Spore might be one of the highest-profile disappointments in all of PC gaming, but it’s also a game I have a huge soft spot for. It was the first game I ever begged my parents to preorder for me (for my birthday at the ripe age of 8), and I adored it endlessly back when I had no concept of what anyone else expected it to be. These days, I find myself longing instead for the evolution sim Spore promised to be rather than the minigame mishmash it ended up as, but maybe all I need is a set of fresh eyes. Lucky me, there’s at least one newcomer to the game somewhere out there.
That’s right: Spore is still moving units, er, unit, according to videogame industry analyst Mat Piscatella. As he shared in a post on Bluesky, Spore is one of nine games (and the only PC game) to sell a single physical copy in October, alongside Backyard Baseball for the PS2 and Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360.
Among video games selling 1 new physical unit in Oct (US):360 Burnout Paradise3DS Carnival Games: Wild West 3DGBA Incredibles 2: Rise of the UnderminerNDA Imagine Fashion StylistPC SporePS2 Backyard Baseball (!!!)PS3 Hasbro Family Game Night 3PS4 Cooking Mama CookstarXBX Ultra Bust A Move
— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T21:27:33.610Z
The source of this data is a monthly videogame market results study from Circana, where Piscatella is senior director, so I can only assume someone hit the bottom of a discount bin at a Walmart in the middle of nowhere. If, dear reader, you happen to know the person who bought a physical copy of Spore in 2025, stay by their side through this process and comfort them when they realize that, yes, the space stage is the only fun part of the game outside of the creature creator.
This is the second sign of life that Spore has shown over the past year: In 2024, the Spore website suddenly fired up again too, complete with an official Discord server. Sure, that’s not a lot of activity, but as the saying goes, the fact that it’s happened twice after all these years (Spore launched in September 2008) is weird. But also cool.
Piscatella habitually shares interesting tidbits about game sales on his Bluesky account, including these monthly studies where commenters routinely ask for a list of games that sold exactly one physical copy. There are no PSP games on the list this time around, but Tom Clancy’s End War did sell two.
Another interesting set of stats from the October study is the year-to-date top 20 best-selling games list, where Battlefield 6 is unsurprisingly dominant and Helldivers 2 takes up the caboose. In a perfect world, Spore would be somewhere on here, but them’s the breaks.
2025 games: This year’s upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together
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The Best Buy near me had a PC Games section up until maybe about a year and a half ago, and I swear they had a copy of Spore there as well. And The Sims 4.
I bought Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop there. They were both just Steam codes inside of a DVD case, but I wanted to get them anyway because I figured I was running out of chances to own a physical box for a modern PC game.
