Need for Speed Franchise May Have Been Shelved by Electronic Arts

36 Comments

  1. clothanger

    yeah just like how they “may” have prevented all efforts to create a PvZ game where people actually enjoy like Plants versus Zombies 1.

  2. NAME5CEREALS

    EA killing another beloved franchise. At least we still have the classics to go back to.

  3. smellyourdick

    >Matthew Everingham, one of the contributors to the website Speedhunters, relayed the following message on Instagram:

    >*Speedhunters is on ice. EA shelved Need For Speed, and that means no more funding for the site.Grateful for everything — the trips, the stories, the lifelong mates. I’m still shooting, just shifting gears into more video.*

    >For those unfamiliar with Speedhunters, it is ‘an international collective of photographers, writers and drivers with a shared passion for uncovering the world’s most exciting car culture stories.’ It was seemingly funded by Electronic Arts, for some reason, and it hasn’t been updated in over three months, with the last post now dated April 8, 2025.

    Not sure how reliable the source is on this subject tbh.

  4. YouThinkOfABetter1

    This may be pure copium, but something being shelved does not mean it’s never coming back. Hopefully they’re giving the series a rest so that when they do bring it back, they have a clear vision on how to make a truly great Need For Speed game. I mean hast much as I liked Heat and Unbound, they were kind of lacklustre.

  5. Practical-Aside890

    May or may not be. Title even says “may”.

    But imo this just sounds like members of “Speedhunters”, an international collective that ea funded. is upset that ea is possibly not funding them anymore? I just don’t see how someone from a side thing that ea funded. be in the know of what ea is doing and their decisions for video games. when they don’t even work for them.

  6. NovachenFS2

    Finally!

    Sorry, but i did not like any of the Need for Speed games that was released since the 2010s…

    And that means, Need for Speed as a franchise had for longer bad games than good ones.

  7. justbecauseyoumademe

    all i want is a remastered version of need for speed underground 2 (THE GOAT)

    update it with more recent cars and a few more customisation options and i would be willing to pay full price

  8. hotstepper77777

    “May”

    Do a little fucking better than “may,” you’re a fucking journalist.

  9. diuturnal

    they killed the series when they handed it back to the studio that only wanted to, or only know how, make burnouts. every nfs by criterion is ass.

  10. DarthVeigar_

    I’m not surprised. NFS has been ass since MW 2012 and Rivals.

  11. Underscore_Blues

    Pretty much bought/gifted by parent as a child every mainline NFS game at release since Most Wanted (2005) 🙁

    They’ve massacred my baby

  12. I mean didn’t they start to work on the new Battlefield like a year ago? IIrc there was some stuff going on that the Team helps with Battlefield and later on “might” go back and pick up on NFS which they started to work on awhile ago.

  13. RedOcelot86

    The issue with the big brands is they try so hard to please everybody, the games always have some identity crisis. Satisfy everyone, please nobody.

  14. splendiferous-finch_

    Need for speed has been in a weird identity crisis for a while now and that makes sense because the franchise used to be very experimental with each era of game having different strengths etc.

    The problem has been a fight between EA’s in ability to risk that same kinda of experimentation to keep things fresh so their solution has been to keep going back to older ideas hoping to bet of rose colored glasses and nostalgia while sprinkling in the things people hate about modern gaming.

    Unfortunately racing be it SIM or arcade or anything in the middle has been in a very stale space for some time. This is a genere wide issue look at what’s happening at turn10 with Forza motorsports or even GT7 main SP campaign on the simcade side. Or the recent staleness of Forza horizon games.

    I feel like split second and blur’s commercial troubles something I blame on unrealistic sales expectations of the suits was the first big domino.

    Fortunately with stuff like art of racing, super woden GP, old school rally inertial drift etc. the indie game market is slowly starting to fill that gap. And with Tokyo extreme racer being back I think some of the AA level interesting stuff might be back as well.

  15. MikeStrawMedia

    EA shelving NFS isn’t new, though. They confirmed it back in February. Series isn’t dead, but we’re years away from it returning

  16. jenkinsmi

    You gotta hate how game series are just always in question, you have to wait 2/3 years to even hear if they might continue, often unrelated to how good the previous game was, and even when something does come, it might be essentially a remake rather than a continuation. Ah well i’m glad we got multiple great modern NFS.

  17. Calvykins

    The worst thing about this that they went full in on need for speed and just left burnout to die.

  18. krissirge

    What happened to all of these more arcade singleplayer focused racing series. Seems like the only things we are getting these days is either racing sims or kart racers.

  19. Yaminoari

    Sounds to me like EA has bound Need for speed for now. Im not sorry for the pun on the picture.

  20. SweetTooth275

    Honestly, it’s better that way. Last really good one came out in 2015 and almost everything around it was quite lackluster

  21. AaronTheElite007

    All they had to do was remake Underground and Most Wanted (the real one)

  22. Left4DayZGone

    I hope they do… and pick it back up when an inspired and passionate developer comes along and wants to make the NFS game they’ve dreamed of since childhood.

    What I liked about Need For Speed, and Classic racing games in general, was the variety in the tracks. One is snowy, one is on cobblestone roads, one is rustic rural, one is beautiful coastline, so on and so forth. The shift to large open world maps may still include a variety of locations, but the fact that they all still have to fit together does finish the diversity quite a bit. I want to feel like I’m traveling the world to race the toughest courses against hometown racers. Send me to France to race against French street racers, then I’m off to Japan, then Italy, etc.

    I miss the highly prestigious presentation of Need For Speed High Stakes. The cars were presented on a turntable surrounded by video screens and studio lighting, your little driver dude wears a tuxedo, the extras menu has informational videos about each car – it made you feel like you were part of a high roller elite racing organization.

    I loved Underground, it was great. I had a lot of fun with it. But something was lost when we went from racing on ancient cobblestone streets in the UK with the most expensive supercars, to Hyundai Tiburons racing through brutalist concrete jungles at midnight.

    I know the series has continued to evolve from there, but it has never returned to that prestigious feel of the earlier games. They felt like “Gran Turismo, except you’re a bad boy and the police are gonna get you”. Now the games feel like “Fast and Furious, but…”.

  23. International-Fun-86

    Sell or license it to a company that cares about the franchise. 🤬

  24. urbantales

    Make Underground 3. Focus on all the things that made the previous games great. The news alone is gone break the internet, let alone the pre-orders

  25. Implosion-X13

    They haven’t made a great one in so long it hardly matters. I had some fun in rivals and heat but they were just shells of what the series used to be.

    The real crime is them killing the Burnout franchise after nothing but a string of absolute bangers. They couldn’t make one nowadays I’m sure. At the very least the soundtrack would be dog shit.

  26. Mycall1983

    Not really news imo, we knew the rest of the devs were moved to battlefield after the support for Unbounded ended. So NFS was put on hold until after battlefield’s release 🤷🏻‍♂️

  27. shadow131990

    Well, rivals was the last one I liked, I don’t think they got it anymore

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