Always On-line Copy Protection Leads To No Darkspore For Anyone - UPDATED

Darkspore Gone Forever Due to Abandoned DRM - The Escapist

Okay, I am probably with most of you going "Darkspore? That's a thing?" but apparently there were people playing it.  However after a series of game crippling bugs the publisher, EA, has decided to stop supporting it.

Why is this news?  Well when it was launched back in April 2011 it required an always on internet connection even if you wanted to play single player. This wasn't overzealous copy protection for a sub par offshoot of Spore.  No, it was needed to "enhance the experience".

Fast forward to just over two years later and a number of server side issues (with informative names like Error 3 and Error 73003) have been making the game pretty much unplayable for the last few months and EA has now thrown up their hands in defeat and stopped patching the game.

This means that the remaining dedicated players basically now have an unplayable game unless a fan has sufficient skills to create a community patch, however if there are actually features on the server side it would be unlikely that a full fix could be implemented.

The real kicker in this story is that EA is still selling Darkspore on their Origin service even after announcing all support has been dropped. I doubt they'll get many last minute sales of the game but it still shows a callous disregard for their customers to be pushing a game they know is broken.

Thankfully the push for "always online" protection seems to be dropping off after much protest from consumers, who have cited this exact scenario as one of their principal concerns.  I don't know about you, but if I buy anything I would like to know it has a shelf life well exceeding two years.

Excuse me, I have a sudden urge to go play my original copy of Sonic the Hedgehog (made back in 1991).

UPDATE: After much bad press EA has announced that support for Darkspore has been re-instated and they will be endeavouring to fix up the errors.  How about they patch it so single player can be played off-line and gamers can host their own servers for multiplayer.