Skate demo delayed because it’s all complicated and stuff

Bad news from the Electronic Arts camp: Scott Blackwood, the exececutive producer on Skate, brings word that the game’s demo (set to be on Xbox Live Marketplace now) has been delayed. In a post over at the EA Forums, Blackwood breaks the bad news to a flood of angry gamers, stating server complications as the culprit.

“As you know,” he writes, “we are trying something completely new for an Xbox Live Marketplace demo by allowing people to play the game and upload footage to our Skate Web site. The thing is: the skate.reel video upload functionality is more technically complex than a standard offline demo.”

Once the demo was submitted to Microsoft for the dreaded certification process, the team was “blindsided” by unavoidable server related issues that needed to be addressed. For once, it appears, MS is off the hook when it comes to this delay.

Blackwood hopes the delay will be minimal (less than a week), and has already stated that EA has sent back a new version of the demo to MS for certification. Frantically refresh the EA forums for up-to-the-minute information, or just play through the BioShock demo for the sixth time while you wait patiently.