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.
The Recent Skate Announcements
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 combined with the fact that Skate has also been announced as a free-to-play title is what is causing the majority of discontent within the franchise's fan base. Being free to play, it can only be assumed that Skate will rely quite heavily on microtransactions to turn a profit. Microtransactions are currently the source of massive amounts of contention within the wider discourse of gaming. The microtransaction system of Diablo Immortal is a stark and recent example of just how controversial an over-reliance on in-game payments can be, especially for free to play titles.
EA's History With Microtransactions
As if the stigma surrounding microtransactions in videogames was not already bad enough, it is felt by many that EA has been actively involved in some of the biggest microtransaction-related controversies historically. Arguably, the most high-profile microtransaction controversy for the veteran company came with the release of 2017's Star Wars Battlefront 2.
At launch, fans were vocally dissatisfied with the unrealistic and monotonous grinds that were necessary to unlock playable characters that many thought should have been included in the base-game, and how this grind could be easily circumvented via microtransactions. The backlash for Battlefront 2's microtransactions was so heavy that EA was forced to completely remove them from the game for a short time, which is a testament to how thoroughly hated they were amongst the community.
The popular and longstanding EA-led FIFA franchise is also no stranger to microtransaction controversy. For many years, the popular Ultimate Team mode within FIFA games has essentially been entirely tied to microtransactions via the purchasing of in-game packs that can provide gamers with the best player cards, which are practically impossible to receive through normal gameplay. Despite EA saying that the microtransactions for Skate would simply be for cosmetics and "convenience," it remains to be seen just how much of an impact they will have on core gameplay. Regardless, EA's track record combined with the free-to-play and live service nature of the upcoming title is understandably worrying to many long-term fans.
Skate is currently in development.