The next Skate will be free-to-play
The Skate franchise has been missing in action for more than a decade. After all these years, it’s coming back with a bold new direction.
On Thursday, Electronic Arts (EA) revealed the fourth installment is called Skate. Yes, we’ll have to stop calling it Skate 4. It’s not supposed to be a sequel or reboot, so developer Full Circle is ditching numbers entirely. Instead, it’ll be a free-to-play multiplayer title complete with cross-play and cross-progression between Xbox, PC, and PlayStation platforms. While the live-service route might scare off long-time fans, Full Circle claims that the microtransactions in Skate won’t be pay-to-win, and there will be no loot boxes.
“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, Skate creative director, said via 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.”
There’s also an all-new Skate developer diary series called The Board Room, which you can check out below. It’s worth watching for the extra gameplay footage.
Development is still early, so don’t expect the Skate release date information anytime soon. Anyone who signed up for playtesting might get to try an early build sometime in the next few months.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.