Skate's Live Service and Free To Play Approach Could Be Worrying

gamerant.com:

The upcoming Skate title instantly developed a serious amount of attention and buzz from the outset of its announcement, and it was clear to see why. With over a decade having passed since the last franchise title, fans have been yearning for a more modern skating experience for a very long time.

Despite the massive amounts of initial hype, the prominent discourse surrounding Skate has recently taken a significantly more negative turn. Following recent announcements regarding important core details of the upcoming game, a prominent sentiment of hope and excitement has now sadly turned to worry and frustration for many.

Skate 4 Leaker Shares Extensive Video Breaking Down Current Playtest

The recent announcements for the upcoming Skate game came straight from development studio Full Circle, who are a Vancouver-based subsidiary company of EA itself. One of the major but less controversial of these announcements was that the game itself will simply be called Skate, as opposed to the moniker of Skate 4 that many fans were priorly assuming. While this detail may seem fairly innocuous, it likely ties in with another announcement that has been one of the main sources of community concern.

It has been announced that Skate is to be a live-service game, meaning that it will receive consistent new content that will be slowly be released to players over time, with the intention of expanding the game's lifespan quite significantly as opposed to providing players with the game's full experience from launch. In fairness, it could be argued that this type of service could work quite well within the Skate formula, as long as the core gameplay of skating itself is comprehensive and engaging from the outset.

However, this live-service approach