Can we address the elephant in the room?

Before I stat this I just want to say that I am a MAJOR fan of the skate brand. I am a die-hard fan of skate 1 through 3.  when skate 4 came out I was so excited to play it, I even requested time off work the day of release for it. But I was soon met with the reality that it wasn't the game I had been hoping for, for the better part of a decade. I gave it a shot for roughly 1 or 2 months, trying to enjoy it, I thought maybe i had just grown out of it. I came back months later to give it another try, and after an hour i was extremely bored. 

Now for the elephant in the room. Reskate. I heard about this a few days ago and decided to give it a try. And to my amazement I had the most fun for 2 days straight like I used to have in skate 2 and 3. It brought back the joy I had in what skate was. A single player game, that allowed me to join lobbies if i wanted to skate with other people. It allowed me to play player-built maps, maps from previous skate games that I missed so much. It allowed me to skate in different times of the day whether I wanted to sesh in the morning, afternoon, or at night. And it just brought back a lot of joy I remembered from the skate 3 days.

That being said I think skate needs to go about how the deal with Reskate very carefully. on average there is usually about 3-4k players on the main game at any given time. At any given time, there are thousands of players on Reskate. This makes me assume that 50% of the players are leaning into Reskate opposed to the main game. And rightfully so as Reskate has been giving players what they have been asking for, for MONTHS. It should show skate devs that the player base is there, they are just extremely unhappy with how things have gone from the start, and it took players creating a mod to make the game what they wanted for it to finally be good.

Personally, I think the owners of skate, and the devs, they should really consider partnering with the coders who created Reskate. And bring them in on the project and game to help develop and create what skate should have originally been. I do agree that giving people stuff that are paid items or areas, should not happen. But other than that, I don't see anything wrong with Reskate. Imagine how good the game could be in just 6 months if they partnered with the developers of Reskate, brought over all the tools Reskate offers minus a few, allowed people to play offline, on custom maps, and tweak the game how they want it to run. Imagine how much better skate would be if that happened.

So, I guess what I'm saying is Please do not kill Reskate. Reach out to the owners of the mod. Get together with them and create something that should have been created from the start. There is no reason that this game can't be brought back to something everyone loves and wants, but unfortunately right now skate just isn't that. I don't want to get too much into why that is because I'm not here to mention all the flaws with the game or what makes it boring. I'm here to suggest that the devs reach out, agree to some sort of partnership and allow the fans to actually have the game they want. Theres no reason you can't make money on microtransactions and still give us the game we want. Id happily buy some stuff and support the game if i was genuinely having fun on it. But when you look at the store in game, $6 for a skateboard, when we haven't gotten any of the things the player base has been asking for is kind of insane. I mean for the 1-year anniversary all we got was a full, black hoodie. A simple black hoodie that's nothing special. 

At the end of the day i think people just want a game that's fun, they get excited to hop onto, and right now skate the main game is just not that, its Reskate. And i don't see that changing any time soon. Id like to hope that it does because again, I love the skate genre. diehard fan of skate 1-3 so much so that ive re bought 360's when they're long out of date just to be able to play the older skate games. I just hope we see a positive outcome from this. And the owners of skate and the devs realize that Reskate is literally showing them what players want, it's literally a foundation for skate to use and make a better game with.