Need for Speed Community Manager Max Myrus has confirmed that the servers for five older titles in the franchise will close at the end of August. Need for Speed Carbon, Need for Speed Undercover, Need for Speed Shift, Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed, and Need for Speed The Run will also be delisted from the PlayStation Store beginning today, May 31st.
All five titles will have their respective servers closed on August 31, 2021. At that point, all online races and other online features will be inaccessible. All offline features will still be playable after September 1. As is usual with all titles whose servers are due to close imminently, the in-game stores close at an earlier date; in the case of these five games, their in-game stores are closing today, May 31.
Myrus went on to detail the reasons why the servers were closing:
Decisions to retire games are never made easy, but we are now shifting gears to focus on the future of Need for Speed. The development teams and operational staff have put a lot of time and passion into the development, creation, release and upkeep of the game over the years, and we love to see you play. But the number of players has come to a point where it’s no longer feasible to continue the work behind the scenes required to keep Need for Speed Carbon, Need for Speed Undercover, Need for Speed Shift, Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed and Need for Speed The Run up and running. We hope you have gotten many victories, satisfying drifts, moments of friendly rivalry, and hours of joy over the last few years out of these games. And we hope you’ll keep driving with us in one of our newer titles – Need for Speed Most Wanted (2012), Need for Speed Rivals, Need for Speed (2015), Need for Speed Payback, Need for Speed Heat and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered – many of which are available via our EA Play subscription. Pedal to the metal.
Those who are trophy hunters may also want to bear in mind that there are online trophies in Undercover, Shift 2: Unleashed, and The Run that will become discontinued on September 1, making the Platinum trophies unobtainable if you haven’t earned those trophies before that date. Shift also has an online trophy in its Exotic Racing Series DLC, but this will not affect the Platinum trophy. Carbon does not have any trophies.
[Source: Reddit]
