EA announce that Skate will be free-to-play

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EA developer Full Circle has announced that their upcoming Skate series revival will be a free-to-play game and follow a live service business model. Also, it’s not called Skate 4, but is stylised as ‘skate.’ with a lower case ‘s’ and a full stop.

It’s an interesting and potentially controversial decision amidst the fanbase, but one that could democratise the skateboarding game, especially with social gameplay likely to be a key part of this genre. Skateboarding is, after all, quite a social extreme sport.

Creative director Chris “Cuz” Parry said that this is less a sequel, remake, reboot or remaster, but rather something new and different. The team is keen to build something alongside the community that they hope to grow, and will add new gameplay content and features based on player feedback.

The new Skate will be coming to PlayStation, Xbox and PC, and there will be full cross-play and cross-progression between these platforms. There’s also a mobile version of the game in development. However, there’s no release window at this time.

That’s not terribly surprising considering that the game has just gone into some extremely early closed testing earlier this month. This build is only available on PC for the time being, but it’s also filled with placeholder assets as the team focus on nailing the fundamentals of a new optional control scheme and other gameplay elements. Of course, gameplay has already leaked from this.

After years of incessant requests, EA created Full Circle in 2021, founding a new team dedicated to develop a series revival. Daniel McCulloch, former general manager of Xbox Live and producer of Forza games, is leading the team, while Deran Chun and Chris “Cuz” Parry are heading up the creative team, both of them have worked on previous iterations of the franchise.

Expect progress to be relatively slow from this point on, given that the studio is barely 18 months old and that many major game productions are taking in excess of three years when they’re being developed by a fully formed studio, let alone one that has to go grow through development at the same time.

Source: YouTube

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