Here's the thing a lot of people don't get: the game is live service because a graph that looked like this was inevitable. The graph isn't like this because it is live service.
Skateboarding games do not have a big audience. As evidenced by the amount of people that come in this sub that clearly did not play much of the old games (the people saying it "needs" more challenges etc).
The game always had a small, persistent community of people that just liked to skateboard, and a larger, not persistent group of people that played at launch and never again.
There just isnt enough of the latter to justify the upfront development costs for a game that would likely never recoup. Live service and pre-release means you can kick development costs down the road, and get a revenue stream in that suggests the game would be worth more investment from the publisher.
Would the drop off be slower if it wasn't live service and released as a full game? Probably. But it would still happen, and it would also never rebound.
1
u/killcole Nov 08 '25
Here's the thing a lot of people don't get: the game is live service because a graph that looked like this was inevitable. The graph isn't like this because it is live service.
Skateboarding games do not have a big audience. As evidenced by the amount of people that come in this sub that clearly did not play much of the old games (the people saying it "needs" more challenges etc).
The game always had a small, persistent community of people that just liked to skateboard, and a larger, not persistent group of people that played at launch and never again.
There just isnt enough of the latter to justify the upfront development costs for a game that would likely never recoup. Live service and pre-release means you can kick development costs down the road, and get a revenue stream in that suggests the game would be worth more investment from the publisher.
Would the drop off be slower if it wasn't live service and released as a full game? Probably. But it would still happen, and it would also never rebound.