Skate developer Full Circle announced this week that the next installment in the beloved skateboard series will be a free-to-play live service game, and the response has been largely negative. Every 2,500 YouTube comments and every tweet I’ve seen have complained about the lack of a single-player campaign — despite the studio not saying there isn’t — and anger at things like multiplayer, microtransactions, and the suspect that since it will be free it will somehow be less “comprehensive”, whatever that means.
So here’s my unpopular opinion, I’m glad Skate is a live service game. I like continuous online multiplayer games and Skate fits that format perfectly. I know we don’t like it when things change, but if you like Skate and want a lot of it, this should be good news.
That said, I think many of the concerns are valid. As we’ve seen from everything from Club Penguin to Dr. Mario World and countless MMOs, online games can only last so long. Even Counter-Strike and Fortnite will one day lose their servers and become unplayable. Publishers like EA need to do a lot more to keep their own games. When huge successes like Red Dead Online are eventually discontinued, I’d really like to see some sort of offline snapshot that people can still access. The preservation of video games is important and we should take every opportunity to get that message across, but just because that’s currently an issue with defunct online games doesn’t mean that online games shouldn’t exist.
Fear of microtransactions is another valid concern, but we run into a problem here that not all squares are. Unless you’re vehemently against all microtransactions in all forms, period (and I don’t think most people are so hard against that), then you are really against dishonest or predatory microtransactions. I’m there with you, we all hate things that are bad, but there’s no reason to flood the comment section of every Skate post with your grudge against microtransactions. I hope the game doesn’t have bad microtrans, just like I hope it doesn’t have bad music or bad level design. Free-to-play and live service are not synonymous with bad in-app purchases, just as buy-to-play games are not automatically good. Did paying $60 for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 make it a good game? Sometimes games generate bad revenue, and I say it when they do, but I see no reason to believe that Skate will, and if it does, we can criticize it.
Skate will be a free game full of hats and stickers that you don’t have to buy if you don’t want to. However, other people will, which means that the game will continue to generate profits and you can enjoy the benefits of other people spending money. The game gets bigger, more content is added and you can enjoy new Skate content long after you would have had a unique release. The live service model means you get more Skate for less money, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
And yes, one day Full Circle will stop making new content for Skate, but when it does, whether it’s two or twenty years from now, you’ll be no worse off than if the studio had just released a game and moved on. gone. , or worse, shut down, which happens all the time. The conservation issue remains, but I don’t think games should be designed around what they will be decades from now, they should be designed for people to play today. The preservation issue is real, even if I don’t believe there are more than a handful of people digging out their PS3 to play Skate 2 anyway, but that shouldn’t stop live service games from existing. I certainly don’t want every game to be free to play, but Skate should be, and I’m excited to see the massive online game it will someday grow into.
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