Electronic Arts recently announced that there will no paid Skate loot boxes but stopped short of confirming if there will be cosmetic loot boxes that can be earned by gameplay or in-game currency. The latter is a given considering Skate will be a free-to-play game and it simply can’t exist without monetization, and dataminers certainly have found references to loot boxes called “Swag Bags” that can be purchased via in-game currency called Taps. Taps can be earned by exploring “Fun City” and by completing in-game challenges.
Why players are worried about Skate loot boxes
Although Taps is an in-game currency that players can earn by playing, fans are vary of EA locking loot boxes behind Taps because there have been a number of cases in recent years of developers adding real money into the equation. Players worry that EA will eventually make Taps purchasable by real currency, making the in-game grind harder and worse, and locking some of the best loot behind Taps that’ll end up encouraging folks to fork out real money if they don’t want to grind.
It’s a reasonable fear and one that isn’t without merit but worth nothing that the datamined information was pulled out of a very early build of Skate and isn’t representative of the final product. That said, players should expect that monetization strategies will be baked into Skate’s development considering it’s a free-to-play game that relies on such a business model. In other words, it might be too early to write Skate off unless free-to-play simply isn’t your thing.
Skate doesn’t have a release date and it looks like it’ll be a while before it’s launched.
In other news, new PS Plus subscribers can avail a 7-day free trial for PS Plus Extra and Premium in some regions, and God of War Ragnarok will have players traversing all nine realms.
