There was an official statement by EA on the official Darkspore forums which, more or less, said that they're done with the game - that statement was quoted in some articles. So, it's not unreasonable to associate its removal from Steam with EA's official stand.

EDIT: Just saw that DaCostaBR covered this already.

My only point was how some heavy bad PR (regardless if justified or not) can result in a rapid reaction to remedy a situation, though in this particular case it feels more like some damage control reaction than genuine care for the game and its players.

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely possible, but it's not as simple as patching out the code that checks in with the servers. You'd have to emulate what the client expects the server to be doing locally, either by replacing the code that does the communications with the server or by emulating the server itself. In either case, EA is unlikely to go through that effort for a title they've abandoned.

If someone wanted to spend the time to reverse engineer the game and it's map/item/character/etc generation mechanisms, then replace it with something that does it locally, it's definitely possible. It's also a significant task.

If pirates can do it, if modders can do it with MMOs (Earh and Beyond for example), then Blizzard and EA can do it. They won't, because they see no profit in it, but they could do it.

The fact these games are not preserved because there's no profit in doing so makes me sad.