Electronic Arts’ chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen revealed that the publisher has no intention of using their deal with Disney to develop Star Wars games based on the upcoming new movies.
Jorgensen made his comments about the video game publisher’s plans for the Star Wars franchise during a speech at the UBS Global Technology Conference yesterday, saying in part:
“We’ve done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing a movie game, i.e., game based on the movie,”
“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 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 ten years and we’ll leverage the strength of the Disney marketing associated with the Star Wars properties both in movies and other things that they may do over the timeframe.”
“We’ll try to align those with that marketing power Disney has so it will get aligned with timing around the movies, but it won’t necessarily be aligned with the movie.”
As far as I am concerned this is nothing but good news. With a handful of exceptions, video games based on movies never turn out very well. On top of that, I have my own personal doubts on whether the upcoming Star Wars films will have any content worth making into a game.
At any rate, Jorgensen also noted that EA currently has three studios working on the upcoming Star Wars titles; DICE, Visceral Games, and BioWare. So far, the only announced game is Star Wars: Battlefront, which is being developed by DICE’s Stockholm studio for a potential summer 2015 release. Given that schedule, it will likely be some time before we get any additional details on what EA has in mind for their other projects.