Remember Ridge Racer Driftopia? Chances are, probably not.

Developed by BugBear Entertainment, the Finnish folk behind Ridge Racer: Unbounded and the tentatively titled, crowd-funded smash-em 'up Next Car Game, Driftopia was essentially a free-to-play version of Ridge Racer: Unbounded.

Its life was ultimately shortlived, however: after an extended closed beta on PC and PS3 since September 2013, Namco has applied the brakes on the project, announcing that the servers will be shut down by August 15th.

Bandai Namco thanked players “for their permanent support and dedication” and stated that “all the feedbacks will be taken into account for the upcoming projects.” It's unclear if the game will be returning after the server shutdown.

Driftopia was widely criticised for its over-reliance on micro-transactions that encouraged you to purchase repair kits to speed up progress. It was part of Namco's experimentation with free-to-play models that saw a wave of F2P titles released such as Ace Combat Infinity and Tekken Revolution.

