Even if you spent untold hours playing Need For Speed, you might still be surprised to know it’s one of the most successful and widely played franchises in the gaming world. It arrived in 1994, and has entertained gamers while helping create car enthusiasts through 25 main installments of the game. Unfortunately, though Electronics Arts (EA) has now confirmed what fans of the series have feared – the Need For Speed franchise is being shelved, so all hands on deck can work on the Battlefield series.
Electronic Arts Is Not Here To Talk About The Past
Need For SpeedElectronic Arts
The important EA-owned studio for this story is UK-based Criterion Games, who took over the series for the second time in 2020. It released Need for Speed Unbound in 2022, but sales weren’t enough for EA, and it wanted to concentrate on its Call Of Duty competitor, Battlefield. EA moved Criterion Games from EA Sports to EA Entertainment, and its main focus away from Need To Speed in 2023 to the Battlefield series.
In 2025, the Need for Speed franchise was put on hold indefinitely, and the studio renamed as Criterion – A Battlefield Studio. If all hope wasn’t dashed by that, Rebecka Coutaz, Vice President and General Manager of Battlefield Studios Europe was recently asked by IGN if the Criterion’s 30th anniversary would be an opportunity to deliver a new Need for Speed game. Her reply was simple: “We are not here to talk about the past; we are solely focused on Battlefield.”
The End Of An Era For Car Games
Need For SpeedElectronic Arts
It looks like the end of the road for Need for Speed unless EA shifts it to another studio again. With a history of 25 main installments spanning four decades, it’s no surprise there have been some hits and misses. It endured, though, but the writing was on the wall with the latest title, 2022’s Need for Speed Unbound. It was well received critically, but didn’t sell well by EA’s standards.
There is another casualty, though, as Burnout is another long-running car game franchise that was handled by Criterion. Like Need For Speed, Burnout is another high-octane game this writer and many other car enthusiasts have spent countless hours playing over the years. Particularly Burnout 2: Point of Impact (2002) and Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005). You may remember Need For Speed Most Wanted in particular for its iconic hero car – the blue and silver liveried BMW M3 GTR.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters
Need For SpeedElectronic Arts
The major players in the gaming industry are in trouble right now as people have grown tired of big triple-A releases being so expensive and being bug-ridden at launch. People are buying fewer games, and when they do, it’s starting to become more and more about creative indie developers and older titles when they become cheaper to buy. The problem for the big studios is that the gaming industry is bigger than the movie, music, and book industries combined.
Call of Duty is only behind Pokémon, Tetris, and Super Mario in size and success as a franchise. But it has been struggling for a few installments now as it tries to extract as much money from gamers as possible while losing its way from what made it so compelling in the first place. EA has clearly seen an opportunity with its first-person shooter in the same vein, Battlefield, to go toe-to-toe with Call Of Duty.
But, at the expense of putting money and creativity into another major franchise, Need for Speed, which is up there with the Madden and Legend of Zelda games in sales. We would bet Need For Speed comes back someday when EA is forced by gamers voting with their wallets to remember that gaming is a creative industry and not a purely spreadsheet-based industry.
Source: IGN, The Gamer
