Skate 3 gets reprinted following its recent YouTube popularity

In a stunning turn of events EA has begun reprinting Skate 3, a game that's four years old.

Why resurrect the somewhat dated skateboarding game as we transition into the next gen in 2014, you ask? Because popular YouTube personalities have given EA Black Box's skateboarding sim something of a resurgence.

According to MCV, UK retailer Game realised there was more demand than supply for Skate 3, so it requested that EA start printing more. The publisher was happy to oblige.

And why wouldn't it be? According to Chart-Track, it's currently the 20th highest selling game in the UK and has rested somewhere in the top 40 all year. In fact, Skate 3 sales have risen 32.9 per cent during the first half of 2014 over what it did during the same time-frame last year.

It's impossible to ignore the correlation between Skate 3's popularity and the most most watched person on YouTube, Pewdiepie, producing several Let's Play videos of the skatebaording game this year. His first video of Skate 3 has been watches over 12.5 million times, and he has six more Skate 3 videos - all but one of which have been watched upwards of 8 million times.

We've seen this sort of thing with games getting remade in HD like Beyond Good & Evil, Okami, and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD. But simply reprinting a game after its heyday is rather unusual, even if it's become a trend lately in television where low-rated shows are resurrected due to popular demand. (See: Community, Arrested Development, Family Guy.) Does this mean we'll get six games and a movie from the Skate franchise? It's unlikely, but you never know.

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