Skate's Studio Cuts Staff to 'Move Faster'

Five months into early access, Full Circle has laid off an undisclosed number of developers from the team behind EA's free-to-play Skate reboot. The studio's official statement frames this as a transformation, a reshaping to "better support skate.'s long-term future." The affected developers are described as "talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of skate." No numbers. No roles. Just the usual careful language that tells you everything and nothing at once.

The timing is rough. Skate only hit early access on September 16, 2025, and while Full Circle claims tens of millions of players have dropped into San Vansterdam, keeping them there has been a different story. The game's online-only structure already frustrated a chunk of the playerbase, and a recent seasonal roadmap update quietly removed the Open World Collection feature to prioritize social modes like Meetups and Turn-Based Competitive. That's not a minor cut. Open World Collection was on the previous roadmap, and pulling it signals that the team is narrowing its scope, not expanding it.

What makes the "move faster" promise particularly hard to swallow is that fewer developers rarely means faster output. Full Circle says the restructure will help them "listen more closely and deliver consistently," but the most recent update on Steam also introduced a new policy of separating features that are actively in development from ones that are just being loosely explored. That's good transparency. It also implies the old roadmap was presenting wishful thinking as a plan.

EA's Layoff Habit Isn't Slowing Down

This isn't happening in isolation. EA has been trimming headcount across the board since early 2024, when around 670 workers were let go. April 2025 brought another 300 cuts, which killed a Titanfall-universe project at Respawn. Cliffhanger Games and the Black Panther game were shut down entirely. All of this is playing out while EA navigates a $55 billion acquisition offer from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners. Full Circle's blog post doesn't mention any of that context, naturally.

For the people losing their jobs, the corporate framing barely matters. Tyler De Block is among those who've spoken up publicly after departing. These are developers who spent years building a game from scratch, shipped it into early access, and are now watching from the outside as the studio pivots around the product they made.

Skate's Season 3 launches March 10, and the game is available on Steam for anyone who wants to see what a leaner Full Circle ships next. Whether the remaining team can actually deliver more with less is the real question, and the answer will show up in the patch notes, not the press releases.