You activated a special interest so you’re getting it: spore is kind of back. EA just gave it a skeleton development team to keep it maintained.
No content updates are on the horizon, but bug fixes and reactivating old promotional content is on the table, plus creature contests. Good time to tickle some Spore nostalgia if that fancies you.
Thrive is a free open source game that tries to do spore but how it was supposed to be. Or it tries to do the first few stages at least. You can play up to a multi-cellular stage atm
Emphasis on the “tries.”
Thrive is currently a barebones tech demo of a more fleshed out version of Spore’s cell stage, it’s hardly even a game yet.