Emperor Palpatine once said "By now you must know that your father can never be turned from the Dark Side." Replace "father" with Electronic Arts and you've got the jist of today's news that the publisher has obtained the exclusive video game rights to Star Wars. With so much success built on the back of exclusive lincenses, including with one with the NFL, EA has repeated the move with one of the biggest brands in the known universe… and galaxies far, far away too.
Having purchased LucasFilm and all subsidiaries and properties therein, Disney shuttered LucasArts and told fans that they'd have news about the future of Star Wars games soon. With EA publishing and continuing to support Star Wars: The Old Republic, it seems like a natural fit for the publisher to hold the license exclusively.
"While we don't have any details to share today on specific titles," EA Games Label President Frank Gibeau said on EA's corporate blog, "our development teams are already brimming with design ideas. The EA Studios that will develop these games are some of the most innovative and popular creative teams in the world, and include DICE and Visceral, in addition to the BioWare team, which is already developing for the Star Wars franchise."
Will DICE quickly clean-up and publish any of the first-person shooter games LucasArts failed to publish themselves? Will Star Wars 1313 and the technology used to performance-capture be finished at Visceral Studios? When will Isaac Clarke and Luke Skywalker meet up and compare severed hands?
"Collaborating with one of the world's premier game developers will allow us to bring an amazing portfolio of new Star Wars titles to our fans around the world," Co-president of Disney Interactive John Pleasants said in a release. You can bet at least one of those new Star Wars games will tie-in to the upcoming movie trilogy already planned with JJ Abrams at the helm.
"The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay," Gibeau said in the same release. Even if you're not a fan of Star Wars or EA, the two are a perfect fit, what with Disney hoping to collect a check and EA in desperate need of high-value products in their portfolio. Online passes and the like won't stop Star Wars fans from buying games.
