Origin's Retirement BROKE Spore on EA Platforms

Huge thanks to Psi and the rest of the Spore Modding Community for all of their assistance and information.

EA has retired and replaced Origin with the new EA Application, but haven't properly integrated Spore: Galactic Adventures which is REQUIRED for Modding.

[Svyatilische]

Thanks to EA, I lost my 10+ year old Spore account. Due to the inability to find out my CD key on Steam to activate it, I am now literally forever banned from entering the network. The funny thing is that this account both exists and does not exist at the same time. My friend sees this account in his game, but it is physically impossible to log into this account due to the "deletion" of the Maxis account system

[godzillasuper]

EA is generally such an evil company that they destroyed a platform that has one of the best version of spore for modding. Thank god we have GoG spore, otherwise it turned out to be a disaster.

[vyanesh]

I really hope this change hasn’t ruined a ton of other older games! D:

[frostysharkboi]

I cant possibly see how EA will financialy recover from this. Its almost like they... no longer care about old games?

But in all seriousness it is kinda annoying how spore's recent crawling growth in popularity has once again been slowed down by none other than EA themselves

[drakensangj]

Of fucking course...god damn it EA.
Having a hard copy is a godsent when it comes to Spore for this reason specifically...Even form a business standpoint this is a really bad decision because making spore unmoddable on multiple platforms now is going to promote more and more people to pirate the game instead of buying it due to the confusion around modding for outsiders of the Spore community.

I was honestly attempting to transfer my copy of spore to origin to allow me to repair my installation a few years ago but im am soo glad that the spore modders discord exists, they helped me recover a large amount of my creations before having to reinstall the game and in doing so I seem to have dodged a bullet. Thank you so much for referring me to them DarkEdge, without you I wouldn't have a modded copy of Spore anymore!

As far as Im aware now there are only 3 ways to play spore modded now: owning a hard copy, owning the game on GOG, or illegally obtaining the game. I cant possibly comprehend why EA would so haphazardly throw around profitable IP's like this, old or not some of EA's most beloved and profitable games are going to be effected by this problem they've made. This just proves how little they care for their old projects and their consumers. Honestly EA never cared, from the start they were a corporation at heart, 'make money at any cost' was always their primary goal, which is why they want control of where their games are distributed.
Lets hope they don't come for GOG next.

But on a positive note...Thank you DarkEdge for keeping all of us up to date!

[KatOwO]

I'm on windows 11 with the Steam copy of Spore and both of its DLC, I also have a lot of mods, but didn't know that GOG also had Spore

[rubinadragon]

Time to get the GOG version, I guess. Spore was removed from my Origin account a while ago for some reason, though I still have creepy and cute.

[Pacca]

I was lucky enough to be able to transfer my keys from steam to origin; I jumped ship from steam because it lacked good mod compatibility (the steam version is weirdly flakey with it and will act strangely when mods try to do certain things). I really would prefer not to do that again, but EA is EA. I'm glad spore is the only thing I own on their platform

[radicallarry]

Thanks for the video! Very informative!
Shame that we're dealing with this issue in the first place, but glad to see solutions still exist

[NyxxyNightstar]

I love having to spend $10 on a C&C key when I already had the DLC for nearly 10 years until EA decided I suddenly didn't own it anymore

[embelished_meister]

I’m glad I found this video cause I was planning on downloading Spore sometime in the future once I get a PC.

[vaniellys]

EA is changing their game application again ? It's the third time !

[HeroLink]

Thanks for this video. Recently, I tried to start up Spore, but Origin prevented me from doing so, telling me I needed to install EA's new app. Fortunately, I managed to download the Spore ModAPI Launcher, and it let me play the game again without any issues! Even still, it's really disappointing how often EA and game companies in general seem to screw over the ability to play their old games, and it seems that the communities surrounding them seem to be way better at preservation.

[captain_space_kin]

So glad I have a physical copy of this game, rip. It honestly sucks how many of EA’s older games are becoming increasingly unplayable (For example the digital port of Dragon Age: Origins has had a huge memory leak problem for almost a decade now and it has yet to get fixed, I’ve heard only reliable digital copy is a pirated version with a community made patch grafted onto it). It’s disheartening that it’s so hard to play these games nowadays, especially since it can hard to get physical copies of them.

[sauraplay]

Thank you for the information! I transferred to the ea app, and everything is good it seems. Also weird side note is that if I try to play GA in the app it just opens like normal spore, and none of the GA stuff is there, but if I use the desktop shortcut it works.

[QuicksilverTheElegant]

Me whose Origin version of Spore was already broken: 😎

I need to go check Sims 3 tho, Origin has all my DLC and a few mods (just NRAAS and other ‘developer tools’, no custom content). My Spore has been broken ever since I migrated to a new PC. My old PC’s Spore was modded with Dark Injections and other mods, but when I switched computers, now the game crashes on start up. Attempting to install the same mods (I might have missed one or two) still didn’t fix the crashing issue. I did buy Spore and its DLC on Steam just to play it, I just can’t mod it since mods don’t work as well on the Steam version. Sorry that EA f*cked up again, DE.

Edit: I still have Origin. I just assumed launching it would overwrite it with EA Desktop but it didn’t, so I was able to run Sims 3 with no issues since I still have Origin. It didn’t even tell me about EA Desktop this time so, for now, my games are safe (aside from Origin Spore foaming at the mouth in the corner)

[ARandCo]

Bad news for us all.
But hey, your English is soo nice! It's a pleasure for my ears to hear you. Good luck, author!

[Daegen]

this is why i chose GOG for spore when i first started modding....not only because it was the most agreeable with mods and like you pointed out, no DRM bullshit.

but the fact there is no 3rd party middle man every time you wanna run your game...as well GOG has the spore collection that basically puts everything and treats it as one solid game. (basically what origin is trying to do, but better). (that and not having to buy the dlc seperately helps too ).

but yeah i figured something like this would happen on origin eventually, i stopped trusting thier launcher when game i bought started dissapearing from my library for no reason and even when i did use it my spore game from it it behaved kind of weird.

[brainimpediment]

why now!!! I just got a PC set up recently and I was thinking about getting back into modded spore again after not playing it for years, and I'm just learning of this :(

[earthsteward]

Someone needs to meme this with the "Wish you were here" cover.