Lucasfilm May Be Working On More In-House Star Wars Games

You'd have to look pretty hard to find someone who doesn't think that EA has royally ballsed up their Star Wars games exclusivity deal. Despite being the only publisher allowed to release AAA games on major consoles and PC, they’ve managed just two poorly received multiplayer shooters. On top of that, and as if to rub salt into the wound, they’ve cancelled a number of promising projects, with the biggest loss being Dead Space developer Visceral Games’ open world single-player adventure. There have been repeated rumblings that higher-ups at Disney are unhappy with the way they've treated the license (particularly the lootbox/microtransactions controversy), and now it's looking as if they might take the license back in-house.

David James

Published: Mar 18, 2019 05:16 pm

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UPDATE: It turns out that these job postings are not an indication of more in-house games. Instead, Lucasfilm remains committed to their licensed game development model and will continue to work with best-in-class licensees.

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You’d have to look pretty hard to find someone who doesn’t think that EA has royally ballsed up their Star Wars games exclusivity deal. Despite being the only publisher allowed to release AAA titles on major consoles and PC, they’ve managed just two poorly received multiplayer shooters.

On top of that, and as if to rub salt into the wound, they’ve cancelled a number of promising projects, with the biggest loss being Dead Space developer Visceral Games’ open world single-player adventure. There’ve been repeated rumblings that higher-ups at Disney are unhappy with the way EA has treated the license (particularly the lootbox/microtransactions controversy), and now it’s looking as if they might take the development of future titles back in-house.

How else to explain recent job postings on the Disney Careers site, asking for multiple higher level personnel to work at Lucasfilm Games? These include Producers and Art Directors, which might hint at them beginning to explore some new ideas for upcoming projects. It’s important to bear in mind that the terms of the EA exclusivity deal grant them the right to make AAA games for current gen consoles, so it’s especially interesting that the listings specifically mention that they’d be working on Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo platforms.

My take is that this is a very good indication that the EA exclusivity deal is coming to an end and won’t be renewed, and about damn time, too. Star Wars is bigger than its ever been right now and the fact that EA has managed just two iffy titles with the license is pretty shoddy. Can we hope for a return to the LucasArts golden days of games like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight? Let’s hope so.

In the meantime, EA at least has one last chance to redeem themselves with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, due out later this year.

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Author

David James

I'm a writer/editor who's been at the site since 2015. Love writing about video games and will crawl over broken glass to write about anything related to Hideo Kojima. But am happy to write about anything and everything, so long as it's interesting!