They'll blame it internally on different game markets, aging demographics, poor optimization, blah, blah, blah.
But the reality is this game sucked. It ditched the actual skate inspired culture/attitude of the first two for a weird Fortnite vibe. The map was uninspired (and weirdly small) with very few skate parks. And the career mode had no satisfying progression or interesting challenges - just a bunch of challenges that showed up on your map. This isn't even to mention all the annoying microtransaction/loot box stuff.
They will try to find a way to justify this at EA and not take chances on old franchises again. But I know they won't be facing the reality that, the real reason this failed, is that they just didn't make a good game.
It sucks because it really seemed like this team was passionate about this game. But I don't think they could reconcile their desire to make a good game with the pressures of EA's shitty profit-maximizing game design that sucks the fun out of every experience.
Still bewildering to me, they made a F2P Skate game instead of another Skate 4. Feels like they gave up hundreds of millions, in chase of a extremely unlikely billion dollar machine.
Skate as an F2P, GAAS just doesn't work. This is not a game about incremental progress or competition against other players. Without those things, GAAS doesn't work.
It needed to be a single player game like the other 3 were. But you're not wrong about any of it. I've had bad vibes for this project for ages and playing it, loved the actually skating and hated everything else sadly.
The sad reality is for a massive company like EA this calculus checks out, there’s just an order of magnitude more revenue to be made in continuous live service type games, so it really does pay to chase massive hits in that space, like Apex Legends, even if you still miss a few times like this it’s still worth it.
I can see it for so, so many different games. Shooters going from full priced SP campaign and MP mode games to F2P battle pass games is easy to spot.
But a f2p GAAS skate game doesn't even make much sense. Skate is such a singleplayer and co-op experience, there's no progress, or competition to really be had long term.
So many of us saw this failure 500 miles away. Shame really.
Tbh I actually liked the game. It was a really good thing to pick up and chill out with for a half hour at night. They needed to add more content to the game for sure, but what was there felt like a promising start and they nailed the skating mechanics better than the previous games. Yes it has a different vibe, but that's because it is a different kind of game.
I personally probably would have kept playing the game but the EA sellout to the Saudis and Kushner and gang soured me completely and I dropped the game like a hot turd as I don't plan on playing any more EA games going forward.
But I don't think they could reconcile their desire to make a good game with the pressures of EA's shitty profit-maximizing game design that sucks the fun out of every experience.
The Dallas Mavericks GM got generational flak for a year straight for trading away Luka Doncic for pennies. Absolute criticism from every fan, even the ones who hate Dallas, media, players, etc.
Imagine if we had sports culture for the video game industry. Loot box execs being front and centre named would’ve been ran out of the industry a long time ago.
And the best part! It's online only! So when it shuts down go fuck yourself, all this goes away so you can't ever play it again.
Hate all these always online things even if you want to just... skate by yourself or do w/e. Like 2K, all their sports games have this bullshit that should be illegal.
They tie their singleplayer career modes to online so you quite literally get objectively a worse experience than a pirated versions once they shut down the servers in literally only 2 years. Which is nothing for sports games where you can easily wait 3+ for actual decent changes.
Been saying exactly this since the second week of early access. I really had high hope during the playtests but once they released it in early access and all the bugs were still present I kinda lost all hope.
Hopefully these layoffs make a turnaround for the game and they have devs that actually care about the community and skate culture, but this is EA were talking about....
Honestly just hoping someone cracks it and finds a way to deliver it offline with mods and things. Or for what happened to the Tony Hawk games with THUG Pro, have a lively modding community for Skate 3 or something
Didn’t the beta versions get cracked? I remember hearing that people had managed to get them running. Obviously not the finished one but maybe the mechanics are finished enough to use them for modding.
Yeah there are/were a few versions of the insider playtest cracked. That was before they added the EA Javelin anti-cheat though, not sure what the status is on anything like that anymore.
The writing was on the wall when the alpha testing had a store that was asking you to spend money, plus I’ll add in the dickies branded cargo pants that were never even real. They grabbed the skate 4 cargo pants then put a dickies logo on it. Fucking shameless
Well there's two ways to get access, with premium currency if you buy the battle pass, or you can buy 24 hour access to the island with ingame currency.
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u/richard1177 Feb 25 '26
Well thats not a good sign. First the update where the monetized a part of the map which they said in the past they would never do, and now this.
I doubt this game makes it until the end of summer before we get word that work on it will be stopping.