EA has announced that all old Need For Speed games will be removed from their digital listings on online storefronts today.
Although the games will remain available to play if they are already owned, buying any of the affected games from online storefronts will be impossible after May 31. Five games in total will be removed, all published between 2000 and the early 2010s.
Need For Speed: Carbon, Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed, Undercover, and The Run will all be removed later today. Some are still available on Steam, but all five have already departed from EA’s Origin Launcher.
The delisting means that in-game stores will no longer be available either, and all online services will be officially retired.
In a post on Reddit, the developers admitted that “decisions to retire games are never made easy”. The decision was in part so that they could “shift gears to focus on the future of Need For Speed”.
“We hope you have gotten many victories, satisfying drifts, moments of friendly rivalry, and hours of joy over the last few years out of these games. And we hope you’ll keep driving with us in one of our newer titles.”
Some fans responded that the lack of warning was “a really unfair move to pull”, and they wished they had been given more time to make their purchases. One pointed out that the announcement “should have been made a week ago” as some countries are already on June 1.
In other gaming news, Grounded, the survival game from Obsidian Entertainment, is going to get less frequent but more substantial updates going forward.
Obsidian Entertainment has announced in a developer update that it is looking at making “larger and slightly less frequent updates” to the game in the future. “Our goal is to find the right balance of keeping the game fresh with new things while giving the team enough time to make quality features,” the developer said.
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