Need For Speed games have been a bit of a mixed bag over the last few years.
Players have seen some decent entries and some spirit-crushing lows. It’s a testament to how wobbly the quality of this franchise has become that the best recent release was a remaster of an entry originally released two generations ago.
Talk to many NFS fans, and they’ll probably agree that a lot of the best games in this series dropped before the Xbox One/PS4 era. Which is why the news we have to report today is so bad.
Need For Speed: Retired
According to a report on Kotaku, Electronic Arts is pulling the plug on several of the earlier NFS games. The full list of those titles are as follows:
- NFS: Carbon
- NFS: Undercover
- NFS: Shift and Shift 2: Unleashed
- NFS: The Run
EA says the games are to be ‘retired’ – in the same way, we assume, a Replicant would be in Blade Runner. Essentially it means they’re going to vanish from digital stores today and their servers are going to be turned off at the end of August.
In a post on Reddit, NFS Community Manager Max Myrus explained EA’s decision:
“[T]he number of players has come to a point where it’s no longer feasible to continue the work behind the scenes required to keep [the titles in question] up and running.”
So there you go. Off to the dustbin of history they go, although if you already own copies of any of these titles you will still be able to enjoy them, albeit without their online features.