A plausable direction for the future of Skate.
As an ex-skater, a gamer and loving fan, I first want to thank you for this wonderful experience you’ve created. There is so much this game offers me so a genuine thanks is in order.
While I love playing this game so much, I wanted to share what I think could be a huge opportunity your organisation might be missing. I’m not sure about what resources are at your disposal, the investments that constitute the game’s development nor how feasible my suggestions are. This is solely a day-1 player’s attempt to give you a fair, non-bias stance of what this game is currently and what it could be.
Skate. Is a clearly a game designed for skate-lovers. This is why I love it… but also why most of my non-skating gaming friends deleted it within a week. While I think skating should be at the core of the experience, if the game was positioned as more of a social sandbox with a strongly-embedded skating culture, many of my good friends who I share thousands of hours with on other games would probably have more incentive to stay.
Think about it this way, most real life skaters don’t just skate around all day. They skate to and from things, people and other life fun experiences…
If skate was a game where we could hop on, skate on our boards to an actual bowling ally to play bowling, a tennis court or snooker bar to name a few examples, how far could this widen the target audience from skate-lovers to... well… everyone?
Skate. could become more than just a skating game, it could be the new social hub for gamers, underpinned by skating culture.
To shift from a slightly unsociable, quiet skating game to an alive social world, there are certain requirements to make this work.
Proximity chat would open players up to new people, funnier social experiences and a more open, vibrant world. In the EA Skate. Facebook page, we can already see people suspecting that real players are actually NPCs with generated name tags. Proximity chat would break down the communication barrier between players and restore the playerbase’s belief that everyone is real and not an NPC.
We can further enhance the social experience by allowing group calls (using the already fantastic in-game mobile phones). This is a feature where we can create a group with our friends so we can always hear each other regardless of proximity distance. When this feature is active, having the character pop an earphone into their ear would be a nice touch.
This alone would completely change up the atmosphere in San Van.
Social connection aside, what else does this game need to sit tightly in its own Skateboarding niche whilst having a great chance of becoming one of the most successful games of next year?...
If the map regularly expanded or was renovated to get; not just new skate parks… but sporting courts, arcades, interactive events like funfairs, maybe even surfable beaches (a hat tip to the original activity from which skateboarding evolved), then we would hugely widen the userbase while keeping the original early-adopters more than happy.
Activities that can be played anywhere in the streets such as chess boards, coin tossing, hakkie sacks, dice, frisbees can be purchased in the store so people can have new kinds of fun with friends and friends-to-be. These items would also benefit from player-to-player marketing as people share their new purchase with friends and strangers they meet who would then want to go to the San Van shop to get one themselve's.
New store items such as backpacks, watches, jewellery and fashion from outside the skate culture would also further personalise the experience for non-skaters while hugely expanding the game’s existing revenue stream.
Everything to do with the actual skating within this game… is well… perfect. Its smooth, fun, challenging and just feels right.
My only tip for further strengthening the skateboarding foundations of this new social sandbox direction is to add a competitive layer to the skateboarding. An essential course of action here is actual games of S.K.A.T.E we can play as duels or in groups. A more ambitious target would be live-streamed tournament events where we can watch players compete live on streaming services or by hopping into San Van to see the event "in-person".
You’ve done so well in harnessing an understanding of what skate culture looks like, but you may have slightly missed the part that makes us Skate IRL in the first place… social connection and memories.
If you can nail that last part, I genuinely think this game can become not just an extremely profitable franchise, but possibly one the highest grossing games of the decade.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks again for all the wonderful things you’ve already done in Skate., and I wish your organisation a strong and exciting future.
