After eleven and a half years, Criterion Games have announced that the servers for Burnout Paradise will be shutting down on 1st August 2019. This will mean that if you’re playing on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC, you’ll be limited to offline play online. Even after all this time it would be a bitter pill to swallow, if not for the fact that Burnout Paradise Remastered came out last year and its servers will (obviously) be unaffected.
Burnout Paradise fans, after over 11.5 years of service, the servers for the original 2008 game will be closing on August 1st 2019. That affects Xbox 360, PS3 and PC versions. Offline play will still be available of course, and Burnout Paradise Remastered servers are unaffected.
— Criterion Games (@CriterionGames) April 17, 2019
It feels like not time at all has passed since the Burnout Paradise first released in January 2008, taking Criterion’s acclaimed arcade racer to a new open world setting. Though hugely popular, it has proven to be the last game in the Burnout series, as Criterion moved over to developing EA’s more mainstream arcade racing series Need for Speed, before the studio was largely folded into sister studio Ghost Games and its founders left to create Three Fields Entertainment (who have just released the spiritual sequel Dangerous Driving).
In the years since, the small team left under the Criterion Games brand have largely run support for other major EA games and studios, developing the free PSVR mission for Star Wars: Battlefront, the Fighter Assault mode for Star Wars: Battlefront II, and most recently the Firestorm battle royale mode for Battlefield V.
Source: Criterion