After twelve years of service, Need for Speed Rivals’ online multiplayer has just bowed out. A decision that perhaps symbolizes much more than just the end of a game.
On October 7, 2025, Electronic Arts officially shut down the servers of Need for Speed Rivalsending all multiplayer features of the title. Released in 2013, this arcade racing game was able to attract a loyal community, despite a start marked by bugs. From now on, only the solo circuits against the AI will remain accessible to nostalgic players.
An announced closure, but a hard blow for fans
The announcement surprised no one. EA had already communicated at the beginning of the year that Need for Speed Rivals would be one of the many games whose servers were going to be closed during 2025. It is now done: “October 7 marks the end of the game’s online multiplayer mode”. If it is still playable in single player, EA clarified that “fans will have to make do with the offline single player mode”, because “there is no offline multiplayer”.
The impact is far from trivial for part of the community, which considered online racing to be one of the main attractions of the game. This closure therefore signals, for many, the effective end of Rivals.
But the shutdown of multiplayer Rivals is not an isolated case. EA continues to streamline its online infrastructure, and other titles will suffer the same fate this month: Madden NFL 22 will go offline on October 20, followed by FIFA 23 on the 30th.
What future for Need for Speed at EA?
Beyond the case Rivalsit is the very future of the Need for Speed franchise which today seems to be in limbo. For several months, major changes have been looming internally at EA. The American publisher would have made the decision to “refocus Criterion as a studio dedicated solely to Battlefield”.
This strategic repositioning fuels the darkest speculations. Some rumors already suggest a pause, or even an outright deletion of the license: “there are rumors that the franchise would be paused indefinitely”. While this remains to be confirmed, the timing of these upheavals coincides with the closure of Rivalswhich is not reassuring for fans of the series.
Since 2023, EA’s rationalization strategy has accelerated. The company has already closed “at least 61 games”, a dizzying figure which underlines the scale of the wave. For economic reasons, keeping servers of old titles online that have become little used probably no longer makes much sense for the publisher. But on a symbolic level, it is a piece of video game history that is erased with each closure.