GameDaily BIZ just got off the phone with legendary game designer Will Wright, who as you know recently left Electronic Arts to pursue his entertainment think tank, Stupid Fun Club (of which EA is a co-owner). Although Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis, reassured us when the news broke that Spore would be in good hands and that Wright's legacy and the culture he instilled at Maxis would help steer Spore's future, Wright today confirmed with us that he will actually still be providing feedback to EA on Spore and other projects.

Falsely assuming that his work on Spore and his other previous franchises is done, we asked Wright if he ever would return to them. He responded, "I don't think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA. I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well."

We followed up by asking Wright what he'd like to change about the original Spore for inclusion in a theoretical Spore 2. "As soon as we released it, because we're giving so much involvement to the players, we ended up learning a lot from seeing what the players do; we've already seen a lot of unexpected stuff happening in the player community that we're learning from," he said. "We're finding out cool areas the fans want to bring the game in, what direction they want the tools to go, what experiences they're enjoying in the game the most, which levels they enjoy the most. So I think now we're at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will – they have their hands on the steering wheel too. We're listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we're looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we're going to go in other directions with Spore."

He added, "I think part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it's more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game – and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack – and we're also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences."

Wright also gave us some added insight into why we haven't heard anything about an Xbox 360 or PS3 version of Spore just yet. "I know there's been a lot of talk about it internally," he admitted, further explaining, "but for us it's really an opportunity/cost issue. You know, we either do that or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can't specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can't do everything at once, so we have to say, 'What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?' So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC... or we could say, 'What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?' I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can't do on other platforms right now. It's represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I'd say that's one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms."

In the full in-depth interview, which we plan to post in the near future, we discuss Wright's plans for Stupid Fun Club, innovation and distribution methods in the game industry, linear vs. non-linear entertainment, his interest in iPhone and much more. Stay tuned!