EA pulls the plug on several older Need for Speed games this week

It’s official: Several Need for Speed games are about to be “retired”, as EA prepares to hand over pink slips from its corporate shotgun when it gathers a chunk of the racing franchise together and delivers the news at the back of the shed.Over on Reddit, EA announced that the servers for Need For Speed: Carbon, Need For Speed: Undercover, Need For Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and Need For Speed: The Run will be switched, meaning that these games will no longer be available on console storefronts.

“The 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 games up and running,” the post read.

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…

The running of these servers have likely become an unnecessary expense for a company that made a mere $5.5 billion last year, although I’d bet my pristine copy of Burnout 3: Takedown that this news will be met with a resounding meh. Yes there’s a good discussion to be had around video game preservation, and all of these Need for Speed games can be found on PS3 or Xbox 360 discs, while PC players likely torrented these games many years ago and promptly forgot about them.

Mind you, the Need for Speed games listed above ranged from okay to “look what they did to my boy” over the years. The Shift games are decent track day entries in the series, while Carbon and Undercover are your usual cheesy slices of EA looking at the Fast ‘n Furious crowd and slapping an Ed Hardy cap on its franchise. Need for Speed: The Run is essentially a Cannonball Run video game without any of the charm or…him.

Anyway, things should be looking up for Need for Speed now that Codemasters is part of the EA family. If anyone can get those games purring under the hood, it’s the studio that has made some of the most delightfully drift-heavy games of the last few years. Just give them a blank cheque, tell them to make a new Need for Speed: Underground, and check back in a few years to pick up the end result. Game development is easy, I swear.

Last Updated: June 1, 2021