Need For Speed World: Where did it go wrong?

EA has announced plans to shut down the servers for some of their free-to-play games on July 14th 2015, inlcuding the MMO racing game, Need For Speed World.

Released globally back in July 2010, NFS World was the first freemium online racing game in an open-world environment by EA. Players could engage in street races, police chases, cruises, car meets and a daily treasure hunt to win in-game prizes. The game was set it in a mixture of the fictional cities Rockport and Palmont from Need For Speed Most Wanted and Carbon with tweaks to make it easier to cross between the two cities and graphical enhancements. 

Not only does NFS World have the largest environment in any Need For Speed game to date, with over 150 licensed cars it surpasses the car count from any other title in EA's racing franchise. Players level up to unlock the ability to purchase car modifications and faster cars for increasingly challenging events. With so much content and claimed figures of more than 20 million registered and 1.5 million active users, World looks like a successful game on paper. In that case, what is hiding behind the headlining statistics?

When you remember the keywords associated with Need For Speed World include freemium and EA, you get an idea of where things went wrong - At the beginning. When the game was released, free users could not progress beyond level 10, restricting them to the first two car classes and forcing them to purchase a starter pack to continue progression. This sparked fury amongst most players but EA chose to remove the level cap for free users once World passed 1 million registered users in September 2010. Still, EA knows there are more ways to exploit paying users, with a key example being the $100 car.

World has encountered other gameplay issues. There was a lack of performance balancing within car classes so out of the hundreds you cars you could collect, only a handful were useful for racing. A new tier system with performance ratings was introduced in November 2011, but the actual performance of cars was largely unchanged. 

At least that was a minor issue compared to the large number of players using cheats to gain an unfair advantage over normal users. Action against them was largely ignored by the development team for a long period of time which put many players off from public racing. Even when it was acknowledged, the problem wasn't completely eradicated and you will still find some bad eggs in public rooms.

I have not played Need For Speed World for a couple of years now and it's not a game I will miss once EA pull the plug on the servers. The game was enjoyable to play for a while but progression did involve grinding, diminishing the long-term appeal of World. Unfortunately for it's active users, the game has reached the end of the road. Need For Speed: No Limits is set to be released later on in the year, taking the freemium racing game concept to mobile platforms. Here's hoping EA have learned from the mistakes made in World and the mobile title sets a new benchmark.