GamingPickz

Need for Speed Rivals

Erase the line between single player and multiplayer in this street-racing rivalry between Cops and Racers. Seamlessly join a world where your friends are already racing and chasing

HorrorOpen WorldRacingSports

Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.

Would you recommend it?
Player score
7.6/10
10,553 reviews
Released
2013
Developer
EA Gothenburg
Platforms
5 systems
Critics
76
Steam Deck
playable
Download
30 GB
We have not written a full review of this game.This is a catalogue entry: everything below comes from a source we can link, checked on a stated date. There is no score and no verdict here, because we only publish those after a reviewer has played the game and written it up properly. Our team may well have played this one. Until someone writes the review, we are not going to imply a verdict we have not put our name to.

What is Need for Speed Rivals?

Erase the line between single player and multiplayer in this street-racing rivalry between Cops and Racers. Seamlessly join a world where your friends are already racing and chasing

Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.

The record

Catalogue facts
First released15 November 2013
DeveloperEA Gothenburg
PublisherElectronic Arts
PlatformsPC, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam Deck
GenresHorror, Open World, Racing, Sports
Languages11 supported

Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q13375520, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.

How was Need for Speed Rivals received?

Players76%positive of 10,553 · Mostly Positive
Metacritic76critic aggregate, PC

Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.

Accessibility

1 declared features

Seeing

None declared

Hearing

None declared

Input

  • Full controller support

Difficulty

None declared

Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.

What does it support?

Technical support
CapabilitySupport
Controllerfull support
Cloud savesNo
Cross-platform playNo
Mod supportNo official workshop
Online playYes
In-game purchasesNo
Steam Deckplayable
Download size30 GB
Add-on content1 DLC listed
Age gate10+

Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.

What does it cost?

$19.99

Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.

Is Need for Speed Rivals worth it?

76% of 10,553 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. It costs $19.99 on Steam, and critics score it 76/100.

That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.

How long is Need for Speed Rivals? How long to beat it

Total play time for Need for Speed Rivals is about 35 hours to do everything, and around 12.8 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.

Need for Speed Rivals length by how much you play
How you playHoursPlayers logged
Just the main story: straight through the critical path12.8h174
Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do20.4h85
Completionist: everything: 100% the game35h59

At its current price of $19.99, beating the main story works out to about $1.56 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.

Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.

Where Need for Speed Rivals sits on the grid

Compare the whole catalogue

Need for Speed Rivals plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.

1 games have both

01000100Players →Popularity →

Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.

Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.

  • Multi-platform

Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.

See the ultimate grid

How positions are decided

No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
  • Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
  • Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
  • No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
  • A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
  • Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.

Estimated sales for Need for Speed Rivals

These are estimates, not reported figures. EA Gothenburg has not published unit sales for Need for Speed Rivals, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.

317K–633KEstimated copies soldon Steam, lifetime
$2.1M–$8.4MEstimated player spendbefore Valve's cut
$1.5M–$5.8MEstimated to the publisherafter the 30% platform cut

How this was calculated

Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.

Sales estimate working
Reviews on Steam10,553
Sales per review30 to 60
List price$19.99
Assumed average selling price33% to 66% of list

What this cannot tell you

Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.

The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.

The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.

Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.

If EA Gothenburg publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.

Need for Speed Rivals price & deals: is it on sale?

We have one reading so far: $19.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.

What readers say about Need for Speed Rivals

Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.

Loading reviews…

Problems players report

We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Need for Speed Rivals on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.

  1. Performance and stutter62 of 300 (21%)

    EA doesn't care about their customers experience, I want to play single player but need to be online and connected to crap servers, FPS is locked at 30, to top it off you have to install some crappy EA launcher thing that I couldn't care less.

    Steam review, 11 March 2025 · 2 hours played · 31 readers marked it helpful

    30 fps and insufferable tutorials.

    Steam review, 31 July 2026 · 1 hours played · 26 readers marked it helpful
  2. Servers and connection36 of 300 (12%)

    WARNING DONT BUY Servers will be taken down next october.

    Steam review, 11 July 2025 · 4 hours played · 264 readers marked it helpful

    The lobby host is randomly selected among the players and when the host leaves/quits, the entire lobby gets disconnected instantly.

    Steam review, 4 January 2025 · 7 hours played · 12 readers marked it helpful
  3. Crashes and freezes30 of 300 (10%)

    There is a mod to raise the cap without messing up the gameplay and the physics, but for me it caused the game to crash at random intervals.

    Steam review, 2 May 2025 · 0 hours played · 11 readers marked it helpful

    - 30fps cap (the workarounds cause bugs and crashes) - EA stole the original game from customers for no reason.

    Steam review, 19 December 2024 · 10 hours played · 9 readers marked it helpful

A further 12 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.

Did it run on your PC?

Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.

Where Need for Speed Rivals appears

The ranked lists and finder pages Need for Speed Rivals qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.

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Games like Need for Speed Rivals

24 games overlap with Need for Speed Rivals on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Need for Speed Heat, Need for Speed Payback and Need for Speed.

All 24 games like Need for Speed Rivals

Part of the Need for Speed series

Need for Speed Rivals is one of 21 Need for Speed games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:

Every Need for Speed game, ranked

Need for Speed Rivals head to head

Common questions about Need for Speed Rivals

What platforms is Need for Speed Rivals on?

Need for Speed Rivals is available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam Deck. It first released in 2013.

How much does Need for Speed Rivals cost?

$19.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.

Do players recommend Need for Speed Rivals?

76% of 10,553 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.

What is the Metacritic score for Need for Speed Rivals?

76 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.

Does Need for Speed Rivals work on Steam Deck?

Valve rates Need for Speed Rivals as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.

How big is the Need for Speed Rivals download?

30 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.

Who made Need for Speed Rivals?

Need for Speed Rivals was developed by EA Gothenburg and published by Electronic Arts.

Is Need for Speed Rivals worth it in 2026?

76% of 10,553 Steam reviews are positive (Mostly Positive), and it is $19.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.

Is Need for Speed Rivals on sale?

Not at the moment. Need for Speed Rivals is at its $19.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.

How long does it take to beat Need for Speed Rivals?

about 12.8 hours for the main story, 20.4 hours with the main extras, 35 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.