Electronic Arts will soon shut down the servers for another game after NHL 21. At least you can play those games offline.

Electronic Arts has announced that online support for Need for Speed: Rivals will end on October 7, according to Delisted Games. Originally released on November 15, 2013 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, the game was released a year later for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in October 2014. The suspension of online services applies to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game. This means that online modes will be unplayable on these consoles, as well as on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

Most racing fans play racing games, including Need for Speed, for the opportunity to race online against other players, but at least for this installment, players can still access an offline mode after October 7. Need for Speed (2015), however, requires a server connection. That game will be unplayable later on. This is not the case for several online-focused games that have recently been shelved. For example, the publisher of Anthem recently announced that it will shut down the game’s online functionality in early 2026, effectively rendering it unplayable.

Games like Anthem, which are essentially being taken away from players, are at the heart of the Stop Killing Games campaign. This campaign is trying to pass legislation that would prohibit developers and publishers from revoking the rights sold to players when they purchase a game. The campaign began last year and has sparked heated debate about game preservation, with the petition recently surpassing 1 million signatures. In response, several of the gaming industry’s biggest publishers and developers (many of whom earn hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and some even billions) have claimed that the Stop Killing Games proposals would make online-focused game development prohibitively expensive.

Minecraft creator Markus Persson, aka Notch, also recently spoke out in the campaign, saying “If buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating them is not theft”, referring to the publishers’ argument that players don’t actually buy a game when they buy it, but only a license to play it until the publisher decides that players no longer have that privilege…

Source: WCCFTech, Delisted Games, Electronic Arts