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Disney’s Lucasfilm Games subsidiary will replace long-time industry partner EA Games with Ubisoft, opening a new horizon for Star Wars.
Disney’s Lucasfilm Games subsidiary will replace long-time industry partner EA Games with Ubisoft, opening a new horizon for Star Wars.
This Wednesday, Lucasfilm Games, a Disney subsidiary, announced that they’re entering a new partnership, this time with Ubisoft. That marks the end to Disney and Electronic Arts’ almost 8 year old exclusivity agreement. Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 (including Lucasfilm Games), entering an agreement the year afterwards.
This agreement marks a big change in the works for Disney-licensed games, following an announcement of a new Indiana Jones game by Bethesda Games Studios. Bethesda and Ubisoft are both newcomers to Disney’s gaming IPs.
Let’s go back a few years:
Star Wars is and was huge, and Disney knew that. After acquiring Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, Disney pushed hard with their new IPs, including planning tons of games and films for the franchises. In order to capitalize on this big purchase, Disney announced a deal with EA Games, marking a 10 year deal of gaming exclusivity.
Almost immediately, Disney and EA plan dozens of games, spin offs of movies, Bounty Hunter games, full open-world RPGs. The issue is, none of that happened. Games were cancelled, projects ended, staff fired. Eventually, Battlefront I came out, three years after Disney’s acquisition.
The game released to mixed reviews, buggy multiplayer, and no single player. BF1 was still a commercial hit however, pushing the two companies to make more games together. These would go on to include Squadrons, Jedi: Fallen Order, Galaxy of Heroes, The Old Republic, and Battlefront II.
While EA had previously suggested that the company was to have exclusivity over Star Wars games for 10 years, it seems like something has changed through that contract. It hasn’t been confirmed what exactly happened, although EA’s Twitter has said that they will continue to produce Star Wars games.
Senior VP of Global Games and Interactive Experiences at Disney said “EA has been and will continue to be a very strategic and important partner for us now and going forward; But we did feel like there’s room for others.”
After purchasing LucasArts, Disney laid off 150 employees in 2013, ending any and all in-house game development. Disney has said that the decision was to reduce risk of poor Star Wars games, although the EA deal has been thought to have sort of ruined that.
EA’s exclusivity deal has been heavily criticized, including by myself, especially due to the lack of Star Wars’ appearance across multiple games. If you exclude mobile and VR games, the number of major Star Wars games developed by EA over the last 8 years, is less than 5. It seems as though Lucasfilm is planning on increasing the number of quality games with more developers, and I guess we’ll find out later into the deal.
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Ubisoft, now the second Lucasfilm game developer, seems to be brought onboard by Disney for one big reason: open world games. Ubisoft has had some incredible open world games. They also have a new and innovative game engine, unlike EA’s ageing Frostbite engines.
We don’t know much about the project yet, as Ubisoft is still hiring, but we know that their division, Massive, is behind the project. It’ll be using their Snowdrop engine, the basis for an upcoming Avatar open-world game as well.
I wish I could go further into detail about the game, but no information about the characters, setting, time period, naming, storyline, or anything has been released yet, so I’m afraid that Statural will have to continue this as a continuous news source, instead of just one post.
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