According to a new report, the Need for Speed franchise may have been shelved by Electronic Arts. The news comes from a rather unlikely place, albeit theoretically trustworthy all the same.
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.
Truth be told, this probably doesn’t come as a complete shock to Need for Speed fans. The series has gone through a series of middling releases, especially between 2015 and 2019, where the three games made ‘solo’ by Ghost Games all flopped. 2022’s Need for Speed Unbound was co-developed by Criterion Games and Codemasters and fared much better, but still didn’t produce good enough sales to warrant a sequel, it seems.
Last we heard, in September 2023, Electronic Arts moved Criterion Games to the EA Entertainment group so that they could work on the next Battlefield as well as a new entry in the racing game franchise. It’s possible that the project wasn’t coming along well, or perhaps EA simply decided that they should focus solely on Battlefield 6, where they are helping with both single player and multiplayer content.
After all, Need for Speed doesn’t really compare with Battlefield in terms of relevance to Electronic Arts; to give you an idea, the publisher is apparently hoping to reach 100 million players for Battlefield 6 somehow. A lofty task, but not completely impossible should the game turn out to be a massive success, whereas racing games are way more niche – even the most successful in recent years, Forza Horizon 5, ‘only’ reached 45 million so far, and that’s counting Game Pass players as well.
In other Need for Speed news, EA has just announced that Rivals, the 2013 game co-developed by Criterion and Ghost, will end its online support on October 7, 2025.
