After they departed the traditional pro skater format and moved onto story based games, the Underground and American Wasteland games, things didn't pan out and Activision was starting to take a hit. Combine that with the release of Skate on Xbox 360 and things looked bleak for the Tony Hawk franchise. The nail in the coffin was all the games that required a board like Tony Hawk Ride and the bust that was Proving Grounds; Skate 2 was out now and the Skate franchise officially took the spot as "the skateboard game". Activision cut their losses and put the Tony Hawk IP on ice.
Until September 29th, 2015 when Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 was released.
After a re-release of Tony Hawk Pro Skater a few months before, everyone had high hopes for this game, to say it was a massive disappointment was an understatement. Skate 3 was old at this point and this was their chance to retake the throne but Activision just basically shat out a game with Tony Hawk and other pro skaters in it. It needed a massive Day One patch to make the game even playable, it launched so broken that if you didn't have internet to update the game it was physically impossible to play it.
Below are the Metacritic scores for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game: 32/100 on PS4 and 39/100 on XB1 making them 2 of the lowest scoring games on each console. There are very few that are just as bad or worse. That is horrendous, absolutely horrendous.
My favourite saying about this game was what EDGE magazine said, "an insult to its history, to its licensed skaters and sponsors, to modern hardware, and to anyone who plays it."
That's how bad that game is. I've never heard any other critic pan a game that badly.
A big reason is one word that EDGE used, license, Activision was about to lose the Tony Hawk license at the end of 2015 if they didn't release a game, so they shoved together shoddy garbage and pushed it out the door as shovelware in order to keep and maintain the license. It's a disgusting thing to do but because of that, they still control the license, yet it has again been put on ice as a franchise and Activision seems to have no future plans for it.
It is a sad end to the series that brought skate culture to the mainstream, a series that a lot of us have enjoyed since our youth, it's what you see happen when corporate greed takes control of things. And in 2017 things were officially shut down, the game is physically impossible to play now. All we can do is hope for a new entry into the Skate franchise soon if we want to play a skateboard game again that or dig out our PS2's to play the old games.
R.I.P. Pro Skater