The controversy was mixed up with the overall dislike of single–player games that required you to have a constant internet connection, which had gotten started

The controversy was mixed up with the overall dislike of single–player games that required you to have a constant internet connection, which had gotten started a few years earlier. SimCity, released by EA in 2013, got a lot more hate because of it than Darkspore did, but at least you could have more than one city at a time and when you finished with one you could still play it as many times as you wanted. If you could stomach it. Darkspore just didn’t have the cachet that SimCity did, so it didn’t attract as much attention.