Skate’s developers say going free to play is a ‘natural evolution of the franchise’
EA’s new Skate is going to be a live-service free-to-play skateboarding game, developer Full Circle announced in a video on Thursday. Fans have been eagerly asking for some kind of Skate 3 follow-up for years, but this new title won’t be the Skate 4 they might have been expecting; instead of a numbered iteration, Full Circle is imagining Skate (that’s the name, though EA stylizes it with a period at the end) as a constantly evolving world with community-created content that’s easy for everyone to ollie into.
“It’s an authentic evolution of the franchise and taking what Skate 3 was in 2010 and bringing it to now and to the future,” Deran Chung, a creative director on Skate, said in an interview with The Verge. “That is not only an evolution of the franchise, but it’s an evolution of where skateboarding is and was from 2010 to now and also where games are from then to now.”
Skate will be available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, with crossplay and cross-progression. (The developers are exploring a mobile version, too.) But the full release is still a long ways away. In June, Full Circle debuted “pre-pre-pre-alpha” footage and invited players to sign up to playtest Skate, but they haven’t given any sort of release timeframe for the launch.
“I think the word ‘launch’ is an interesting word for us because of the way we are developing the game and the fact that we want to get players’ feedback very, very early,” Isabelle Mocquard, head of product management on Skate. “We are just very flexible with what’s going to be the list of things that will be available at launch because I think that it will depend. It will depend on what our fans are telling us. To be honest, I can’t share that list with you because we want to build it
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