A pair of independent developers have given Electronic Arts a headache by releasing ReSkate, a modding platform that frees its Skate reboot from compulsory online play and lets gamers run their own servers.
According to PC Gamer. the project attracted more than 350,000 downloads from GitHub within days of release, suggesting that plenty of players would quite like to enjoy their skateboarding without EA supervising every trick. ReSkate supports offline play, private servers, custom maps and modifications to the game’s appearance.
EA launched its free-to-play Skate reboot in early access in 2025, built around an online-only live-service model. Although players have praised aspects of the skating mechanics, the game has attracted mixed reviews on Steam, with complaints about premium cosmetics and restrictions on player-created content.
The developers behind ReSkate, known as zee_x64 and ReGlitched, previously worked on R5Reloaded, a modification platform that allows players to run private servers for EA’s Apex Legends. Their latest project modifies a particular Steam version of Skate, bypassing the requirement to connect to EA’s servers.
zee_x64 said: “Honestly didn’t realise how big this was going to be. We were just doing it for the love of the game.” The developers insist they have no intention of replacing the official service or undermining EA’s ability to make money from the free-to-play title.
ReSkate does not provide access to premium cosmetics without payment, and its official channels prohibit modifications designed to unlock paid content. The developers have said EA needs revenue to keep the game running, although they clearly believe players should have much more freedom to modify their own experience.
The platform supports community-created maps and custom cosmetic items, and players can already import environments from Counter-Strike. It lets users experiment with character appearances without waiting for EA to add specific items to its rotating selection of cosmetics.
ReSkate operates independently of EA’s servers and anti-cheat software, which also lets the game run on Linux through Valve’s Proton compatibility layer. The modifications cannot be used to cheat on EA’s official servers because the two environments remain separate.
The developers revealed that AI-assisted coding tools helped speed up the reverse-engineering work, although they emphasised that considerable technical knowledge was still required to make the software function. Zee_x64 said the work could have taken years without those tools, providing a rare example of AI producing something gamers actually wanted.
There is still the small matter of EA’s lawyers, who may take a dim view of enthusiasts dismantling the company’s carefully managed online ecosystem. Zee_x64 said the developers would comply with a cease-and-desist demand, although the project’s open-source code has already been copied into more than 70 separate GitHub forks.
The software has encountered another complication because antivirus products have flagged some downloads as potentially malicious. Its developers attribute those warnings to techniques including DLL injection and memory modification, which game modifications commonly use but that can resemble malware behaviour. Those explanations do not, on their own, establish that every release is safe.
