Video game developer Electronic Arts explained some of the details of its deal with Disney and Lucasfilm to create Star Wars video games. Chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen revealed at the UBS Global Technology Conference that the deal is for the next 10 years and will not include movie-based games.
EA and Disney announced the deal back in May, confirming that EA’s DICE, Visceral and BioWare will each work on their own games based on the sci-fi franchise. DICE is the team that worked on Battlefront and the first Star Wars game under the deal will be Battlefield.
According to Gameranx, Jorgensen said that Battlefield has “a lot of people very excited.” It’s expected to be released in 2015, the year that Star Wars: Episode VII opens.
However, when 2015 comes around, don’t expect to see a game based on Episode VII’s plot. According to Variety, Jorgensen noted that Star Wars is such a big universe that there’s no reason to limit themselves to a movie plot.
“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,” he explained. “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.”
Jorgensen explained that they will work in tandem with Disney’s marketing machine and will be developing games across multiple platforms. He also discussed how Star Wars: The Old Republic has turned into a success after a difficult launch. The game, which reportedly cost $200 million to produce, is now free-to-play.
“We brought the economics in line, so it’s a profitable business for us,” he said. “We think as the Star Wars franchises start to grow with Disney’s investment, we’ll continue to see more excitement around that game as well as the other games that we’ll start to produce.”
image: Amazon