To the surprise of absolutely no one, EA Games is planning to kill off another of its mainline games, this time targeting the 2013 Need for Speed: Rivals. The game is shutting down on Oct. 7, while the move itself shows EA's seeming disregard for the Stop Killing Games initiative.
Without so much as a proper article on its site, EA Games has placed Need for Speed: Rivals, a mainline entry in the series, on its "Online Services Shutdown" list. The title's online servers will be "sunsetted," as the term goes, on Oct. 7, with the game seemingly being rendered unplayable as of that date.
This is the second major EA title that is going offline this year, with Anthem recently suffering the same fate. The Online Services Shutdown list also shows that several other titles are going to be killed off this year, at least on some platforms, such as NHL 21 on PS4 and Xbox One.
It's honestly a wonder that the game has survived over a decade on last-gen consoles and PC, given how keen on shutting stuff down EA is (as are other major publishers). We currently do not have information on whether this title will have a proper end-of-life implementation or if it'll continue to be playable in an offline format. Given that Need for Speed titles are as much single-player games as they are online services, it'll probably retain some level of playability post-mortem.
However, recent practice in gaming implies it'll be taken offline for good, meaning that once it's gone, no one will be able to access it in any capacity.
EA's move comes amid the growing Stop Killing Games movement, which has recently crossed its mandatory one-million-signature threshold on its European Citizens' Initiative, the benchmark where it will mandate a response by the European Union.
The petition has over 1.3 million signatures as of this article and keeps growing with each passing day. Its cut-off deadline is July 31, and it seems likely to gather between 1.4 and 1.5 million by then, which should ensure it has enough left once vetting is performed.
If it succeeds in its demands to make video games products and not services that can be shut down on a whim, perhaps we'll see EA, Ubisoft, and similar publishers change how they develop and maintain their online-oriented titles.
What do you think, Destructoid? Should EA just let us keep playing games even if they turn off support? Will the SKG initiative manage to reshape how games are developed and maintained? Let me know below.
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