User blog comment:Lost Labyrinth/The fall of The Sims series/@comment-1519608-20130308030219/@comment-2201555-20130309152729

While we're talking about "Maxis", Spore was seen as an earlier milestone for a lot of the criticisms with SimCity, only were they smaller scale. The released copy of Spore had implemented the controversial SecuROM DRM system, which limited how many times you could install to your PC as well as installing rootkits to the computer. A version without SecuROM was released to Steam which did improve on things a bit but the gameplay was seen as shallow anyway and didn't keep people playing as long as older IPs like SimCity or The Sims did. Darkspore derived from Spore and gameplay-wise that didn't fare any better.

RIP to the Maxis we used to see...