Darkspore
EA sold a creature-building action RPG that required its servers even for solo play, then made every legitimate copy unusable when those servers closed.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general availability
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
An always-online action role-playing game by Maxis that adapted Spore's creature editor into squad combat.
Players collected and modified heroes across a campaign and cooperative missions, but authentication and core game state remained server-dependent.
Existence timeline
Maxis presents a combat-focused Spore spin-off.
Darkspore becomes generally available for purchase.
Authentication outages repeatedly make the game inaccessible.
EA adds the game to its service-shutdown schedule.
The mandatory online service ends and ordinary play becomes impossible.
Why it ended
EA removed the game from sale and permanently shut its servers on 1 March 2016 after years of declining support.
Last confirmed trace
Retail media, client files, videos and reverse-engineering efforts survive, but the released game cannot operate normally without replacement server code.
What it left behind
Darkspore became a defining preservation example of a purchased game erased by mandatory online infrastructure.
How we classified it
The archive unit reached normal public release or operation and is no longer obtainable in its original public form.
Verified normal public availability maps to 100 under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.