EA’s new Skate is free to play

polygon.com:

The creative team behind Electronic Arts’ new Skate — the first new entry in more than a decade — revealed more details about their skateboarding game on Thursday, including its full name: Skate. Just Skate, though EA stylizes it with a period. (It’s Skate.

Chris “Cuz” Parry, creative director on Skate, said the new game is not a sequel, remake, reboot, or remaster of the original Skate, but something new. “We’re in it for the long haul,” Parry said, and developer Full Circle will add new gameplay content and gameplay elements to the game based on player feedback.

The new Skate will be a free-to-play game and is coming to Windows PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms, EA and Full Circle announced, with full cross-play and cross-progression. A mobile version of the new Skate is also in development. The developers did not announce a release window for any version of the game, only committing to “when it’s ready.”

The developers said that, yes, Skate will have microtransactions to fund its continued development, but said they will largely be cosmetic. The team said that it’s looking to games like Apex Legends, also from EA, as inspiration for monetization.

Fans can sign up to playtest the game for a “pre-pre-pre-alpha” look at the next Skate, EA and Full Circle announced in June.

A new Skate game was officially confirmed in 2020, after a yearslong campaign in which fans of the franchise flooded EA’s social media channels with the #skate4 hashtag in an attempt to convince the publisher to revive the skateboarding series. In 2021, EA announced the team creating the new Skate, a studio branded Full Circle. Leading Full Circle is Daniel McCulloch, formerly a general manager of Xbox Live at Microsoft, and Parry and Deran Chung as