Am I The Only One That's Glad Skate Is Free-To-Play?

thegamer.com:

Skate developer Full Circle announced this week that the next installment in the beloved skateboarding series will be a free-to-play live-service game, and the reaction has been largely negative. All 2,500 YouTube comments and every tweet I’ve seen has lamented the lack of a single-player campaign - despite the fact that the studio hasn’t said there isn’t one - and anger towards things like multiplayer, microtransactions, and the presumption that since it will be free, it will somehow be less “fleshed out”, whatever that means.

So here’s my unpopular opinion, I’m glad Skate is a live service game. I love ongoing, online multiplayer games, and Skate is a perfect fit for that format. I know we don’t like it when things change, but if you love Skate and you want a lot of it, this should be good news.

That being said, I think a lot of the concerns are valid. As we’ve seen from everything from Club Penguin to Dr. Mario World, and countless MMOs, online games can only exist for so long. Even Counter-Strike and Fortnite will one day lose their servers and become unplayable. Publishers like EA need to be doing a lot more to preserve their own games. When massive successes like Red Dead Online eventually shut down, I’d really like to see some kind of offline snapshot that people can still access. Video game preservation is important and we should take every opportunity to make that message clear, but just because that’s currently an issue with defunct online games doesn’t mean online games shouldn’t exist.

Related: Skate 4 Needs To Make Its Open-World Feel Alive

Microtransaction anxiety is another valid concern, but we’re running into a not-all-squares-are-rectangles problem here. Unless you’re vehemently against all