Skate Is Pulling In Players And Money, Despite Mixed Reactions

Three weeks into its Early Access release, the new Skate game seems to be doing extremely well, despite a very divided audience.

Officially, Skate^[1] has apparently brought in 15 million players so far across PC, PlayStation and Xbox. Of course, it is a free-to-play title, so there’s no barrier to entry. But a lot of those folks seem to be sticking around, based on the Steam numbers. According to SteamDB,^[2] it’s been drawing 50-70,000 concurrent players per day over the last week, putting it 12th in terms of daily active users.

But are any of those people spending money? Alinea Analytics is claiming to have the numbers,^[3] stating that Skate has brought in around $3 million in revenue so far. That amounts to an average of $0.20 per player. As in most cases for a free-to-play title, though, it’s far more likely that a small percentage of the players make up the majority of the cash.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the game fares in the future. Opinions are divided right now, with OG Skate players loving the gameplay but struggling to accept the squeaky clean visuals and the overall corporate vibes difficult to accept. Newcomers seem to be enjoying it far more as just a fun hangout game.

Personally, I’m in the middle of writing up some impressions, but to keep it short and simple, I mostly fun into the first camp. I’ve got a lot of hours in the original games under my belt, and while I’m loving the actual skating, almost everything else is annoying me. The lack of an offline mode, the Fortnite visuals, the AI companion, the characters and almost everything else about the presentation feels like the anithesis of everything Skate. It’s a difficult hurdle to ollie. The only way I can accept it is to frame it as not really being a new Skate game, and viewing it as its own thing.

The game’s first season is going to fire up soon, so that’ll be the first glimpse at what the free-to-play model for the game is going to be moving forward.