The long-awaited release of the newest entry in the Skate franchise wasn’t necessarily what many people were hoping for.
It’s something we acknowledged in the opening of our Early Access review: the hype train for a new Skate game, even one that’s fallen victim to the live service genre, is still something many people are excited about.
As it stands, the game’s initial launch left some results mixed at best. It seemed like things were starting to turn a corner, with the game’s most recent Steam reviews labeled as “mostly positive.” However, EA has been introducing some changes into the game that are turning people off.
A new update has decreased the Chip ward amount in-game. As one comment points out, this is now the fourth reward nerf since the game launched. “Player base keeps dipping, so they’re nerfing the grind to try and squeeze more time out of people.”
Things aren’t faring much better on the game’s official forums, with several posts complaining about the change and trying to figure out what the logic behind this is.
Why are the challenges back to giving only five rip chips per objective? When it was changed to 20 per, it made the smaller challenges actually worth it. Now there’s almost no point in doing any challenges since some boxes are over 400 rip chips.
For Many Fans, This May Be The End Of The Line With Skate
Despite a turning of the tide in Skate’s Steam reviews, its player count tells a different story.
According to SteamDB, the game’s all-time concurrent player count was 134,901 as of September 21st, 2025. That was five days after the game officially launched in Early Access and was notably the first weekend following that release date.
Skate is also available on Xbox and PlayStation platforms, and the concurrent player count does not include players on platforms other than Steam.
Since that first weekend, the game many thought was only a pipe dream has been in steady decline. It’s not due to a lack of interest in the skateboarding genre; Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 received strong reviews and, across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, reached just under 2 million players. A large portion of these players are through Game Pass, but they’re still actively playing the game, so again, the demand for the genre is clearly there.
As such, some fans aren’t giving up hope just yet. Many seem content to throw in the towel, seeing these changes as yet another money-grabbing ploy by EA to retain a metric like “Monthly Active Users” by pulling the carrot further out of reach for players. In other words, the game is reducing the amount of rewards you get from completing tasks, meaning you’ll need to play longer than before to obtain something.
This is something that has plagued live service games in the past; rather than spending an hour or so to unlock that cool skin you were wanting, you’ll need to spend several hours, if not longer, which inflates the game’s playerbase, making it seem like it’s doing better than it actually is. No one should have to do extra work in a video game to obtain digital rewards. That’s no longer fun, it’s work.
User 4our2wentyy on the Skate forums sums it up best: “The changes you’ve made tweak rewards but sidestep the real issue: Rip Chips lose purpose at endgame, and RIP Score is granted in the wrong places. Fix those, and both the currency loop and the progression ladder start making sense again.”
Whether or not the Skate developers will listen to the overwhelmingly negative feedback on these changes remains to be seen, but if the long-awaited Skate reboot has any chance of succeeding, it needs to make sure it’s not upsetting its already dwindling playerbase.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
