Just when you thought the Need for Speed franchise was over and done, EA announced their new plan for the biggest selling racing game of all time.

The most recent NFS, Undercover, was a complete flop. The reviews were terrible. Even hardcore fans were disappointed in the game and it showed in the sales figures, with fewer than a million units sold. That’s less than half the number of copies sold in the previous installment of the series – which was also considered a disappointment.

After EA closed down the studio that developed Undercover, most fans thought that was the end of the road for the franchise. And maybe it was time. It was hard to escape the feeling that NFS was trying to be too many things to too many people. It had “real” cars, races, chases, stories, multiplayer, etc.. These days, that’s just too much for one game to pull off effectively. Not to mention, expensive to develop.

It seems EA got the message. On Friday, 1/30, EA announced the future of the franchise. Starting this year, NFS will become 3 seperate games, developed for distictly different kinds of gamers.

Need for Speed SHIFT will be a realistic racing simultion game, similar to GRID or GTR. It’s due out in the Fall of 2009 for the PC, PSP, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Need for Speed Nitro (working title) will be more of an arcade type of racer, developed exclusively for the Wii and the DS. It’s also due out this Fall.

Finally, Need for Speed World Online will be a play-for-free MMOG and will be available exclusively on the PC. We may not see this until 2010 but the official word is a Winter 2009 release. We’ll see.

Only time will tell if this strategy will work for EA. Clearly they think the Need for Speed name is too important and valuable to abandon completely. Let’s hope the rigid release schedules don’t mean more of the same when it comes to the quality of play we end up with.

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