Electronic Arts has announced that Battlefield Hardline–the 2015 FPS entry in the series focused on police and heists, not traditional military warfare–will shut down on console this June.
The game will be removed from the PS4 and Xbox One storefronts on May 22, and that’s also when people won’t be able to buy any more in-game content. The game’s servers, meanwhile, will close on June 22.
Hardline’s single-player campaign will remain playable after the server shutdown date for anyone who owns the game currently or buys it before it’s removed in May. Physical copies of the game will also remain playable offline.
The PC version of Hardline is not being removed from sale, nor is its online functionality going down. EA, and other companies, are know to delist games and turn off online support as games grow older, so the announcement about Hardline is not a total shock.
EA said the decision to retire online services and delist games is “never easy” for any game. However, EA said it becomes “no longer feasible” to dedicate time and resources to older games when player levels dwindle. This is a blanket statement, and EA did not provide any specifics as to how many people are still playing Hardline on console or PC. Data from Steam shows that Hardline reached a peak of 34 concurrent players in the past 24 hours, and that’s not a lot (although the game is also available on other digital PC stores, too).
In related news, Remedy recently announced that instead of closing FBC: Firebreak, the studio is giving the game one more update, dropping the price, and adding a Friend’s Pass.
The shutdown notice for the console edition of Hardline comes just a few days after EA celebrated the game’s 11th anniversary on March 17.
Hardline launched in March 2015, and GameSpot’s Hardline review scored it a 7/10. It was developed by Visceral Games and was the final game the studio released before EA shut down the studio in 2017.
Hardline’s single-player campaign told a story that touched on a real-world topic: the militarization of police forces in the United States. The game was controversial for that reason, and the developers sought to avoid making a political statement.
The game’s campaign played out with an episodic TV presentation format, with its plot aiming to be tonally similar to Elmore Leonard novels like Out of Sight.
On the multiplayer side, the game mixed things up with heist-themed modes like Hotwire, in which Battlefield’s trademark Conquest flags became drivable cars that moved around the map. Another mode, Rescue, is a hostage-rescue mode. The Blood Money mode, meanwhile, has players attempting to steal money from a truck like something out of a heist movie.
The latest Battlefield game is Battlefield 6, which was 2025’s best-selling game in the US. Earlier this month, EA announced cuts to various Battlefield development teams around the world amid the publisher’s pending sale to an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia.
