Need For Speed ‘shelved’ by EA as Forza Horizon 5 PS5 sales hit 2 million

EA’s plans for Need For Speed seem to have been put in hold but Forza Horizon 5 has proven there’s still a strong appetite for racing games.

Arcade racing series Need For Speed was once a juggernaut franchise for EA, with its best-selling entry, 2005’s Need For Speed: Most Wanted, selling over 16 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the Fast & Furious films, at around the same time, no doubt contributed to some degree, as the Need For Speed games pivoted from Hot Pursuit to street racing, with 2003’s Need For Speed Underground debuting two years after the first film came out.

However, while the Fast & Furious films continue to be box office juggernauts, Need For Speed’s popularity has nosedived over the past decade. The last game was 2022’s Need For Speed Unbound, developed by Criterion, which was a financial failure.

There have been rumbles of another Need For Speed being in development at Criterion, most recently in February last year, but it seems EA has put those plans on hold.

According to photojournalist Matthew Everingham, who was a contributor to an EA-backed car culture website called Speedhunters, the developer has pulled its funding for the site because it has ‘shelved’ Need For Speed.

‘Speedhunters is on ice,’ an Instagram post from Everingham reads. ‘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.’

The Need For Speed IP is listed as an ‘entertainment partner’ on the Speedhunters website, which is described as an ‘international collective of photographers, writers, and drivers with a shared passion for uncovering the world’s most exciting car culture stories’.

GameCentral has reached out to EA for comment.

If Need For Speed has been shelved, this might be due to Criterion’s commitments on the next Battlefield. Criterion is one of four studios working on EA’s plans for a ‘connected Battlefield universe’, alongside DICE, Ripple Effect, and EA Motive.

EA announced it had moved the ‘majority’ of Criterion staff onto Battlefield in 2023, but a blog post at the time claimed ‘work will also continue on what’s next for Need For Speed’ at the developer. Earlier this year, EA laid off up to 400 staff across various studios, so it’s possible Need For Speed has been caught in the crossfire as it prioritises Battlefield.

It seems racing games in general have been knocked down EA’s priority list, after the company ended its partnership with the World Rally Championship in May this year. ‘For now, we are pausing development plans on future rally titles,’ EA said at the time.

Presumably EA feels racing games no longer attract the audience they once did, but there’s no obvious reason why they shouldn’t, as Microsoft has proven with the Forza Horizon franchise.

Open world arcade racer Forza Horizon 5 has sold two million copies in one month on PlayStation 5, according to the LinkedIn profile of a former game designer at Turn 10 Studios (as spotted on ResetEra).

This is particularly impressive considering the original game came out on Xbox Series X/S and PC almost four years ago, in November 2021.

At the same time though, the more serious Forza Motorsport was a sales disappointment for Microsoft and developer Turn 10 was badly hit by company wide layoffs earlier this month.

But Need For Speed has rarely been a serious racing game, so the problem here seems to be with EA, not changing consumer tastes. EA even has a back-up franchise to fall back on, in Criterion’s Burnout series, but there seems even less chance of that returning in the short term.

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