Oh, the irony.

I'm sure they were telling the truth. They just said copy protection, anti-piracy measure or used a code instead like plum syrup.
Why? What irony?
[Edit:] Okay, always-online is really ironic

It's not online anymore.

So, the date is insignificant?

But what's ironic about that? Did they assure us that it would stay online?

I bought SPORE, but discovered that it was a childish tech demo with no gameplay whatsoever. Then I bought DARKSPORE, because surely any actual game using SPORE's monster design engine must be awesome. But sucked too. Now both games has closed their servers.

EA isn't doing such a good job, IMHO.

No, I guess it's just about the wording. Using the term "always" is a bit of a misnomer now.
Does that just affect Spore's online elements, or is it entirely impossible to activate it now?
Then again, since Spore was limited to five activations, there probably aren't many viable copies left, anyway.

Okay, thanks. I get it now.

You can still play it in offline.

Anyway, despite shutting down the SPORE servers, EA are still boasting about the the games online features on Steam:

There are countless people who are for some reason obsessed with phalluses. Did EA filter out specific creations?

That's just brilliant.

I'm having a hard time anyway buying ea games here on gog drmfree, but I do it with the thought of supporting drmfree movement and principle.
But buying anything else ea related? origin? drm? never had never will, I'm not that stupid.

This is only possible because consumers are dumb.

Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Yeah, sure, there are a lot of players running around, you can't get around that, but most of the game can be completed alone - ie. solo. There are instances and sidequests that require multiple players to cooperate (or at least require you to be a much higher level than intended for said quest, I can't remember if I've seen any that actually set a hard lower limit on group size), but those are just that, sidequests - you can get through the whole storyline for all classes by yourself.

Sometimes the customer has to be burned REAL hard before they notice how bad a company is. Unfortunately with billions of potential customers, being an asshat might not affect their bottom line.

EA overall is a pretty evil company; Costing people jobs, money, destroying games and franchises, lawsuits intended to whittle down competitors to bankruptcy due to legal fees, stealing code from competitors and turning it into a multi-billion dollar franchise. etc.

To say no less that Microsoft has done similarly, although maybe not to the same insidious level.

I haven't played it, so I guess that I maybe would consider it an anti-consumer move not to include an offline version.

However, the glaring difference between those two games is that Dark Spore has two game modes and the possibility of playing "solo" is advertised on the box.
I see no way around accepting that this Star Wars MMO is a Massively Multi-player Online game in which you, naturally, can just ignore other players and that Dark Spore is a single- and multi-player online-DRMed game

Just the possibility. As I understand it, you had 1 save slot, you couldn't delete it, and you couldn't replay the story/solo campaign, instead after you beat it you were stuck merely replaying randomly generated levels based on a difficulty level you set rather than being part of the story.

More than once I'd like to replay the story personally.