'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. EA writes that 'decisions to retire games are never made easy', but explains why they decided to do it like this: This means the games will be harder to buy and only the offline features will be usable in the future. A prime example of this comes from EA that has now confirmed that Need for Speed: Carbon, Need for Speed: Undercover, Need for Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and Need for Speed: The Run is being both delisted from all digital stores and the online servers are about to shut down on August 31. All fun things must come to an end eventually.