Tien jaar lang Star Wars-games door EA

De deal die Electronic Arts met Disney heeft gesloten om Star Wars-games te mogen maken, geldt voor tien jaar. Het enige Star Wars-spel dat EA tot nu toe heeft aangekondigd is Star Wars: Battlefront 3. De games worden niet direct op de films gebaseerd.

"We've done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing a movie game - i.e. a game based on the movie," zo laat CFO Blake Jorgensen weten bij een UBS-conferentie.

"The beauty of the Star Wars franchise is that it's so broad and so deep you don't have to do a movie game - you can do a game that's very focused on the world that's been created around Star Wars."

"We had a long relationship obviously with Lucas on the original Star Wars, and when Disney took over Lucas they really wanted to maintain a video game business around Star Wars. They felt it was very valuable and a lot of people loved the games historically. And so they came to us because of our partnership, and they knew that we could help them develop really great games, and we struck what we believe is a fantastic deal, which allows us to be able to build games in many different genres across multiple types of platforms over 10 years."

"We'll try to align those with the marketing power Disney has so it will get aligned with timings around the movies, but it won't necessarily be aligned with the movie," aldus Jorgensen.

Toch heeft Electronic Arts niet alleen maar positieve ervaringen met de serie. Zo kwam bijna twee jaar geleden de mmorpg Star Wars: The Old Republic uit. Het was EA's duurste game ooit, maar de game was geen groot succes. "Yes the original expectations obviously were very, very large, and obviously the multiplayer MMO world has - the popularly has come down over time and we tried to restructure the Star Wars business to better match the economics."

"It's a great business that's very repeatable. We brought the economics in line so it's a profitable business for us."

"...And as the Star Wars franchises start to grow with Disney's investment, we'll continue to see more excitement around that game as well as the other games that we'll start to produce," zo besluit Jorgensen.