In the past, publishers who had a hold of the Star Wars franchise managed to produce games that were based on films or television properties, such as Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars. Electronic Arts, however, wants to take a different approach.
The company has announced that, as part of its ten-year deal for the franchise through LucasFilm, that it intends to produce original efforts, instead of games tying in to forthcoming films, like Episode VII, due in late 2015.
“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,” EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen told attendees at the UBS Global Technology Conference on Tuesday. “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,” he added.
The first of these new games, the DICE-produced multiplayer affair Battlefront, should make its debut on next-generation consoles in 2015.
Source: Variety
