- Primary Subject: Star Wars: Galactic Racer (v1.0 Launch / Base Game) & Criterion Games' Racing Lineage
- Key Update: While Criterion Games now focuses solely on Battlefield, its former Burnout and Need for Speed leads launched the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Galactic Racer (88 on Metacritic) outside EA.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: November 12, 2026
- Quick Answer: Criterion Games pivoted exclusively to Battlefield, while its former Burnout and Need for Speed developers continue making arcade racers at Fuse Games, Three Fields, and Stellar.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launched in October 2026, and reviewers kept comparing it to Burnout, and it currently sits at 88 on Metacritic for PS5.
Fuse Games, the studio behind it, was founded by Criterion's former general manager and four of his senior leads, who left the Guildford studio in December 2022, the month Need for Speed Unbound shipped.
Three months before Galactic Racer launched, IGN visited Criterion for its 30th anniversary and asked whether Need for Speed or Burnout might come back.
Rebecka Coutaz, VP and general manager of Battlefield Studios Europe, answered: "We are solely focused on Battlefield." Criterion still exists, but most of the people who made it a racing studio work somewhere else now.
Criterion started walking away from racing in 2013
In September 2013, around 70 Criterion staff, roughly 80 percent of the studio, moved to Ghost Games UK to work on Need for Speed. Alex Ward tweeted that "Criterion is just 17 people these days." Ward and co-founder Fiona Sperry left in January 2014.
Need for Speed returned to Criterion in February 2020, when EA turned Ghost into a support studio. Criterion shipped Unbound in December 2022 after a delay caused by its Battlefield 2042 support work.
EA moved most of Criterion onto Battlefield in September 2023 and left a core group on Need for Speed. Unbound's final update arrived in February 2025, and the rest of the team followed.
Criterion co-developed Battlefield 6, which sold more than seven million copies in its first three days in October 2025. The studio has since been renamed Criterion: A Battlefield Studio. EA laid off an undisclosed number of its staff in March 2026.
Ward and Sperry spent a decade rebuilding Burnout from scratch
Ward, Sperry and Paul Ross incorporated Three Fields Entertainment in February 2014. Sperry told PCGamesN it "was never the long-term plan for us to stay doing Need for Speed."
Ward was blunter with Gamereactor. Talking about Most Wanted's Wii U version, he complained that team members could not even buy their own game.
The studio started with around seven people, with racing games that read like Burnout broken into parts. Danger Zone (2017) spun Burnout 3's Crash Mode out into a full game.
Dangerous Driving (2019) brought the racing back, and Eurogamer's headline called it the road not taken by Burnout 4.
Wreckreation was meant to be the big one. THQ Nordic published it in October 2025 as an open-world takedown racer with a live track builder, and it landed at 62 on Metacritic.
No sales figures have been published. In December 2025, weeks after launch, Sperry put the entire studio on redundancy notice once THQ Nordic's support ended.
The team kept patching anyway through Patreon and shipped 18 updates by May 2026.
In July 2026, Sperry started a new studio, When Tides Turn, which owns the Wreckreation IP and is self-publishing Wreckreation 2 with UK grant funding.
Sperry's pitch leaned on the old name: ask anyone for a great arcade racer, she told Traxion, and "they'll still say Burnout." Ward is not listed in When Tides Turn's leadership, and his current role has not been confirmed.
Paul Ross kept Criterion's back catalog on sale
Ross was Criterion's lead programmer on Burnout 3 and technical director on Revenge and Paradise. After Three Fields, he started Stellar Entertainment, and EA handed Criterion's remasters to his team.
Stellar made Burnout Paradise Remastered in March 2018 and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered in November 2020, both with Criterion.
Stellar has also been hiring for an unannounced AAA arcade racer in Unreal Engine 5 since May 2022. In January 2024, the studio posted that "the bosses still haven't issued any take downs," which set off a round of Burnout speculation.
The game still has not been announced, and it has not been canceled either.
The Need for Speed leadership left together and came back with Star Wars
Webster had been an executive producer since the Burnout 3 era and ran the studio as VP and general manager from 2013. Lake had joined Criterion as an artist in 1996.
They announced Fuse Games in Guildford in March 2023, with Webster as CEO. Kieran Crimmins, Unbound's creative director, joined later and directed Galactic Racer. Webster told The Game Business that Fuse has 75 people internally.
Webster has said Criterion's vehicle work on Star Wars Battlefront helped Fuse land the Lucasfilm deal. Galactic Racer, published by Secret Mode, is a track-based arcade racer with a run structure.
Webster describes its crashes in Burnout terms. "Racing is crying out for a bit of consequence," he said. Burnout, he told GamesRadar+, used to "throw rewards at you," and Galactic Racer is built to challenge players more.
Most of the other Burnout names left racing entirely
Siobhan Reddy, a producer on Burnout 3, became studio director at Media Molecule. Paul Cross, lead race designer on Revenge, went on to creative direction on Ubisoft's Rocksmith.
Craig Sullivan, creative director on Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted 2012, moved to Ghost in 2013 and led Rivals before Amazon Game Studios hired him in 2017. The veterans who stayed in racing are mostly at Fuse, Three Fields or Stellar.
Criterion's racing lineage now runs entirely outside EA
EA still owns Burnout and Need for Speed and has never said either one is finished. When Unbound's support ended in February 2025, Vince Zampella said EA planned to bring Need for Speed back "in new and interesting ways."
EA's $55 billion take-private by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners closed in August 2026, and nothing published since ties the new owners to a racing revival.
The old staff list keeps shipping racers. Fuse has an 88 on Metacritic, and Sperry's team is building Wreckreation 2 without a publisher. The most recent game with Criterion's name on it is Battlefield 6.
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