EA Skate Speculation Leading into to E3
I've seen a lot of speculation over a handful of things such as Atiba posting on Instagram from EA in front of their headscanning photo booth recently, EA refiling their Skate trademarks, and EA instituting the Skate servers again. I believe it was last February when an EA employee tweeted "#Skate4" and everyone went nuts also. It seems every year before E3 myself and many others get our hopes up due to something!
I guess what I'd like to do is break down why (potentially) none of this points towards Skate 4. First, Atiba being at EA. If you take a look at Atiba's Instagram, it's pretty apparent that he doesn't only do skateboarding photography/filming. He has a lot of lifestyle photos up and pictures of NBA players and similar athletes posted as well. I don't think it's farfetched to assume that Atiba, a local to LA and a photographer close to a lot of NBA players would be hired by EA to shoot for upcoming NBA games or headshots for Ultimate Team updates which EA does regularly. Him being in front of the cameras could just be him troubleshooting/setting up before bringing in subjects to shoot. Now if we saw a pro at EA or someone like Reda, then I'd be a little more likely to say that points towards something happening in the Skate world. That said, I could be wrong, I am just speculating. I feel like if EA was at the point where they were bringing in pros and skate photographers and all that, it'd be extremely hard for news of a Skate 4 to stay tight lipped. I'll post that Atiba screen grab at the bottom of this post.
As for EA refiling trademarks for Skate, this is something they will probably do for a very long time. They are still selling copies of Skate 3, both physical and digital, so they need trademarks. This is not proof of anything unfortunately.
So the servers going back up, this isn't one I can so easily brush off and it's the one making me speculate a bit towards something positive happening. Now, to start I'll say this could just be a simple quality update for a user base that isn't dwindling on Skate 3. The game is in the EA Vault, it's being sold digitally and physically, and they've even put the game in Xbox One cases for physical copies now. It's clear they're making money off of the game in it's current state and simply bringing servers back up where people can share clips and parks and all that is one easy way to keep people playing and to bring new and old players to the game. So while this is my personal favorite answer to the servers coming back up as it's not one based in hype, I can't help but wonder if they could have something coming up at E3.
This is where I'll make some baseless assumptions about what I think COULD happen at E3 or the near future. I do know that Skate was a VERY expensive game to make for EA. That coupled with the fact they had no way to bring in micro-transactions to further the profit made and make it a profitable game (like FIFA, Battlefield, Madden) is why we don't have a Skate 4. So while I don't think we're getting a Skate 4 I do think we could be getting a full on Xbox One/PS4 Skate 3 remaster with some new areas to skate. It's something I really could get behind. Even more speculative, what if they are remastering/reworking the worlds from Skate 1 and Skate 2 to be playable in Skate 3 with all the controls and mechanics of Skate 3 (walking, etc..) I think this is a way for EA to not have to spend the $20,000,000+ on making a Skate 4 and still capitalizing on the hype and bringing something fresh to the Skate world. Could this be what we see at E3 if we see anything at all? Could something 100% in house like this be quiet enough for us to not hear anything about it yet?
What do y'all think? Do you have any thoughts on what could be coming or if anything at all is coming?
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Atiba's photo:
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Originally Posted by My Elementality
