May 11, 2016 07:23 AM EDT By Vinny, UniversityHerald Reporter

Need for Speed fans rejoice! A new entry of the popular online open world racing video game is on the docket, and it would be racing onto the scene in 2017, developer Ghost Games has announced.

A blog post on Need for Speed's official website reads, "We are now building upon the foundations that have been laid with Need for Speed and delivering our next game in 2017."

While Ghost Games has begun work on the next installment in the series, which is slated to be released in 2017, the studio behind the popular open world racing video game also divulged that Need for Speed will not be receiving any more updates.

This announcement comes after the studio released the SpeedList update for PC as well as console versions of the game.

The title recently received a slew of updates including several new activities that were lacking in the initial release last year. In addition, the title was also updated with competitive multiplayer, which is a prestige mode.

Although Need for Speed franchise was an annual release earlier, there will not be another entry this year. However, this is not the first time EA has skimmed over a year, the publisher of the popular racing videogame skirted a year back in 2014 too.

In the blog post, Ghost Games noted that players have spent a lot of time on the roads of Ventura Bay, collecting more than a whopping 9.8 billion REP points, taking more than 35 million Snapshots, competing in more than 10 million Drag Races and beating a mind boggling 52 million Eddie's Challenge Events.

The post also pointed out that players have spent an unbelievable 950 million minutes customizing cars, which actually helped in earning the $2.5 trillion in-game cash. Players have shared more than 700,000 wraps and this resulted in more than 13 million downloads by their fellow Need for Speed fans, the post noted.

This is clearly a surprising move from the studio citing the response to Need for Speed title.

Apparently, the developers consider it enough of a success to green light another entry. That said, fans will be hoping that Ghost Games allows offline play, especially after realizing that the game online was not as smooth as players would have expected, reports NDTV.

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