EA has confirmed that its new live-service Skate title will come to mobile after PC and console. IAPs will be mostly cosmetics-driven, says developer Full Circle.
In an announcement video outlining the vision of the new game (below), EA’s Full Circle studio said that its dev team was formed during the pandemic and is mostly remote, with staff located in Vancouver, Montreal, Seattle, Orlando, LA and more.
The game is a new online multiplayer title with user-generated content, social features and regular content drops. The PC and console version is being tested in what EA calls “pre-pre-pre-Alpha”, and there’s no launch window just yet. It’ll launch “when it’s ready”.
“Skate will be full cross-play and cross-progression, across last-gen, next-gen and PC. We’ll take it even further as we’re continuing down this road, and do the same thing with mobile,” said EA Full Circle general manager Dan McCulloch.
“We want cross-play and cross-progression on mobile. We’re pretty early on in mobile but we want to get the controls and everything to feel great. And when that’s ready we’ll bring it all together and you’ll be able to play on whatever platform you want with your friends.”
The dev team was careful to outline its monetisation strategy, with McCulloch saying that the title is not ‘pay to win’ and won’t feature loot boxes.
“We knew that to support a never-ending, ever-evolving free to play world of Skate we’d have to look into different models for the game itself,” he said. “Which means there will be microtransactions. And we know this is a sensitive subject. That’s why when we decided to explore this model, we made some hard ground rules to follow.”
“The first one is that Skate is not pay to win. There are no areas of gameplay or the map that you will have to pay to unlock. There won’t be any loot boxes and there’s no gameplay altering advantages that you can pay for as well.”
EA Full Circle head of product management Isabelle Mocquard continued: “When we were looking at this model, we looked at versions of it out there that we liked and those we didn’t. And we’re still continuing to explore different options, but we are taking inspiration from games like Apex Legends or other popular titles that are free to play where spending money is totally optional and it’s mostly about cosmetics and convenience.”
