15 'Always Online' Games That You Can't Play Anymore
12. Need for Speed: World
0The Need for Speed franchise has had a rough go of it in recent years. Just when the franchise seems to have found its biting point, it proceeds to stall and let other games such as Forza Horizon overtake it. For every Need for Speed Unbound, there's a Need for Speed Payback. The series has struggled to find its footing since its peak with Need for Speed: Underground and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
Would you believe me if I said that in 2010, EA decided the best route to take with the franchise was a free-to-play MMO racing game that was only playable on Windows PC? Because that's exactly what happened. Need for Speed: World was the bold reinvention of the franchise that EA was hoping would boost the franchise ahead of its competitors and was seemingly part of EA's plans to introduce more iconic IPs to the free-to-play MMO world, as we saw FIFA World and Battlefield Heroes around the same time.
Surprising nobody, Need for Speed: World failed to attract an audience big enough to sustain its servers, and in 2015, EA decided to shut the servers down for good, with the publisher saying that the game "no longer lives up to the high standard set by the Need for Speed franchise". Mind you, 2015 was the same year that the Need for Speed reboot came out, so those "high standards" must've been considerably lower than we all initially thought.