Disney is perfectly fine with EA botching its Star Wars video games
In 2013, Electronic Arts and Disney signed a 10-year licensing agreement that gave EA the sole right to produce Star Wars video games. Since then, the developer has produced are two lackluster, unimaginative Star Wars: Battlefront games, both of which had their fair share of controversy. (For comparison’s sake, when LucasArts was managing the Star Wars license, we got 16 games over the same span of time.)
With fans unhappy and lots of negative publicity surrounding EA’s Star Wars games — some governments have passed laws banning practices from Battlefront II, for heaven’s sake — you might think that Disney would cut ties with EA and find another company to handle Star Wars games.
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Well, think again, because during a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Disney CEO Bob Iger painted a rosy picture. “We’re obviously mindful of the size of that business but over the years we’ve tried our hand at self-publishing, and we’ve found that we haven’t been particularly good at the self-publishing side.”
"We’ve just decided that the best place for us to be in that space is licensing and not publishing. We have good relationships with some of those that we’re licensing to, notably EA."
That sounds an awful lot like Mr. Iger isn’t aware that there’s an active FTC investigation into Battlefront II’s aggressive loot box system. Call us, Bob.
Despite everything, EA and Disney are pushing forward with a new video game: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Titanfall studio Respawn Entertainment, which is owned by EA. The game will follow a young Jedi Padawan who survives Anakin Skywalker’s slaughter of the Jedi trainees in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
Fallen Order is due out with holiday season, but given that EA cancelled a promising-looking Star Wars single-player game not long ago, that’s not a sure thing. Still, the House of Mouse is staying the course, believing its time is better spent “elsewhere,” whatever that means.
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