As part of the celebrations for Xbox’s 20th anniversary, more than 70 original Xbox and Xbox 360 games are now playable on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S thanks to their backwards compatibility features. The list includes several incredibly popular titles like all three Max Payne games, Dead or Alive Ultimate, and Skate 2, which means the entire Skate series is now playable through backwards compatibility on Xbox.
While this was exciting news for Skate fans, the official skate Twitter account shared some unfortunate news of its own that potentially sucked all the hype out of Skate 2’s addition to Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. On December 12th, in less than a month’s time, EA will be shutting down the game’s online servers, on both Xbox and PlayStation.
Aside from Skate 2’s single-player career mode, the game offers online multiplayer, allowing players to take part in competitive and cooperative activities. But with the servers shutting down, that mean’s the multiplayer goes with it, which is disappointing both for long-time players and those who have only just started playing.
It's arguably not too surprising that EA has decided to shut the servers considering Skate 2 released over 10 years ago in 2009 and the playerbase has no doubt dwindled since then. EA adds that this isn’t a decision it made lightly, but it’s still some rather bizarre timing since its addition to Xbox backwards compatibility would likely generate a new surge in players and online activity that could justify keeping the servers online for a while longer.
This wasn’t the only disappointing news to come out of the whole thing either. Microsoft also revealed that this batch of games for Xbox backwards compatibility will be the very last. So, any original Xbox or Xbox 360 games that aren’t available through this feature never will be. Microsoft has cited licensing, legal, and technical constraints as the reasons why it’s calling it with this last selection of titles.
On the bright side, Skate fans do still have a new game to look forward to in the future. There haven’t been many updates on the project since its announcement, but Skate 4 was officially confirmed to be in development last year. The game was sadly absent from this year’s EA Play event, with the last update being a simple teaser that didn’t actually feature any gameplay, only reactions from content creators and skaters.