How much is the power of creation worth?

That’s the hundred-million-dollar question in the videogame world as Spore, the heavily hyped and much-delayed epic from The Sims creator Will Wright, finally reaches stores this week. Spore arrives with exceedingly high expectations, both from gamers and from its company, Electronic Arts.

Big game releases are now major cultural events: In April, Grand Theft Auto IV raked in a staggering $500 million in sales in its first week alone—roughly equivalent to The Dark Knight’s record-breaking domestic box-office gross over seven weeks. But Spore, which was released in Europe last Friday and in North America two days later, isn’t likely to outgun G.T.A. or break any opening-week sales records.

For one thing, it’s a PC title, which makes it a throwback in a world driven increasingly by consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii (E.A. has said it wants to focus on PC users first). And then there’s the nature of the game itself: Spore is a quirky simulation that gives players the power to create new life-forms and control their evolution as a species.

Just like an organism that gradually finds its niche and exploits it, Spore is likely to follow the business model established by Wright’s best-known creation, The Sims (when Wright first started working on Spore seven years ago, he initially called it Sim Everything). According to E.A., over 100 million units of The Sims, in which players control the daily lives of virtual people, and its assorted expansion packs ranging from The Sims House Party to The Sims Hot Date, have been sold since 2000, and Sims-related sales for fiscal year 2008 are projected to be around $500 million. Over the franchise’s lifetime, the Sims has generated well over $2 billion in revenue.

Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, predicts Spore will sell 3 million copies by the end of E.A.’s fiscal year in March. Though that pales in comparison to a major console title such as Grand Theft Auto IV—which has sold 10 million units since April—it’s more than respectable for a PC game. “Spore is probably good for $150 million this year and then ongoing sales of about $100 million annually,” says Pachter. “That’s a nice business.”

But the longer-lasting potential could be from other revenue streams not previously exploited by U.S. video game companies. For one, E.A. is betting that the creative nature of the game will lend itself to robust brand extensions and licensing deals. “User creativity is one of the core tenets of Spore, and we want to give people the ability to share that with their friends,” says Patrick Buechner, vice president of marketing for E.A.’s Maxis division, which developed Spore. To that end, the company has signed with outside vendors so that players can take the creatures they design and put them on T-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise. E.A. has also struck an exclusive agreement with YouTube to allow people to upload clips of their creations to the popular video-sharing site, with the two companies sharing the ad revenue generated by the traffic

Perhaps most intriguing is the potential for monetizing a virtual marketplace within the game. Though Spore isn’t technically an online title (like the massively successful World of Warcraft), it does have an online component which allows users’ creatures to be uploaded to other players’ worlds. That same pipeline could be used to facilitate “microtransactions”—virtual deals for game-related resources that are paid for with real money. “So, for example, if you build a really super spaceship defense for your planet, and 100,000 people out there want it for their own planets, they’d have to pay you a buck each,” explains Pachter. “Even with E.A. taking, say, 30 cents out of each transaction, that’s a sweet deal.” While gray markets involving real money exist for virtual goods in other games, revenue sharing between users and game companies for these goods would be a novel concept.

Though E.A. hasn’t officially announced such a marketplace, it’s widely assumed that it’s just down the road. In July, Electronic Arts C.E.O. John Riccitiello hinted during a conference call that they were already working on implementing some version of these microtransactions. “The game is all about creating cool stuff,” says Pachter. “A marketplace for that stuff seems like a natural. And the intriguing thing about that is that it would be a brand-new business model for games.”

Which, in the end, could be Spore’s most notable creation.