EA has announced that online support for Need for Speed: Rivals will be ending later this year on October 7, 2025. The shutdown was spotted by Delisted Games, where a reader noticed Rivals had been added to EA’s list of games that are getting their online services shutdown.
Need for Speed: Rivals launched over a decade ago, on November 15, 2013, and originally launched for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, before coming to Xbox One and PS4 a year later in October 2014. The shutdown of online services is for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, meaning that players on those devices and on current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, will no longer be able to play any of the game’s online modes after October 7, 2025.
Racing against other players online is the core driving factor for why most racing fans play racing games, Need for Speed included, but at least in the case of Rivals, there is still an offline mode for players to dig into, if they want to revisit Rivals after October 7. But that’s not the case for several online-focused games that have been shut down recently, like Anthem, which EA recently announced will have its online functionality shut down in early 2026, effectively making the game unplayable.
Games like Anthem essentially being taken away from players is at the crux of the Stop Killing Games campaign, which is trying to get legislation passed that prohibits developers and publishers from taking away rights that they sold to players at the point of the game’s purchase.
The campaign began last year and has recently been a hot topic of discussion regarding game preservation, as the petition recently surpassed 1 million signatures. In response, several of the video game industry’s biggest publishers and developers, many of whom pull in hundreds of millions of dollars each year, some of them even billions, claimed that the proposals made by Stop Killing Games, if accepted, would make creating online-focused games “prohibitively expensive.”
Minecraft creator Markus Persson, commonly known as Notch, also recently weighed in on the campaign, saying “If buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating them is not theft,” referencing the argument from publishers that players don’t actually buy games at the point of purchase, but a license to play them until such time that publisher decides players don’t get that privilege any more.
