The upcoming skate. game has an early access release date of 2025, according to a (admittedly vague) post from the developers on Xitter. It's hard to write about a new skate. game because if you choose to write skate. in the style that Electronic Arts insists skate. publishers dictate, you'll have to put a period after every instance of the word skate. , which makes your sentences about skate. sound very stupid and. drawn out. with. pauses. Game makers, please stop putting punctuation in your game titles.
“We're incredibly happy to announce that Skate will launch in Early Access in 2025. We'll share more details about what to expect in the coming months,” the Full Circle developers say, fully embracing lowercase letters except for the words “Early Access.”
Punctuation confusion aside, the skateboarding game looks like a lot of fun. The footage shown so far shows some awesome prototype sandboxes and dozens of skateboarders jumping off rooftops and flying down skyscrapers, set up like a giant human pachinko machine (see below). There's also a playlist full of tester highlights, and some excellent redemption compilations. Meanwhile, the developers have been having regular informal chats about what's going on inside the company.
Watch on YouTube
This sense of transparency hasn’t always been 100% voluntary, mind you. An alpha version of the game’s multiplayer version leaked online in 2022 , but even that doesn’t seem like a big deal for a studio that’s leaning toward semi-open development. I like seeing blocky versions of unfinished levels, and work-in-progress animations that twist and bend in alien ways. It’s a nice reminder that video games don’t look fully baked. For a long time, they looked like silly, improvised playgrounds made of cardboard and brightly colored rope. Yes, they look unfinished. But there’s something charming about a prototype level. Sometimes a rough draft can be just as nice as a finished piece. I once blocked off a construction site for the skateboarding sim Session . It was simple as hell, but I was happy with my big cubes and simple colors.
If EA’s new game can replicate some of the fun of building your own skatepark, I’ll be happy. For now, I have cautious hopes. Session was great for its realistic foot physics. And OlliOlli World’s arcade-high scores gave me blisters on my thumb. But the series’ return will hopefully deliver a crazy world somewhere between hardcore simulation and cartoon kickflipper. The big caveat is that this will remain a free-to-play game with microtransactions from EA, and the live service model isn’t always healthy.
All that being said, I'm not “skate” anymore. It's just Skate now. I don't care if people confuse this new entry with the original Skate from 2007. You should have thought of that when you decided Skate 4 wasn't good enough, EA. I'm sticking to a long-standing RPS principle: If your game's name is stupidly formatted, we'll either fix it, make fun of it, or both.