nerd radio

Get ready for the new daily show

EA’s Star Wars games won’t be based on the new movies

November 21st, 2013 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

At the UBS Global Technology Conference, EA Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Blake J. Jorgensen spoke about the company’s upcoming games and spoke at length about their deal with Disney. It might surprise some people, but they will not be doing any games based on the movies:

“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. 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 had a long relationship obviously with Lucas on the original Star Wars and when Disney took over Lucas, they really wanted to maintain a video game business around Star Wars. They felt it was very valuable and a lot of people loved the games historically. And so they came to us because of our partnership and they knew that we could help them develop really great games and 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 10 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. We’ll try to align those with that marketing, power the Disney has so it will get aligned with timing around the movies, but it won’t necessarily be aligned with the movie.”

Jorgensen also mentioned that the people at DICE are still working on a new game in the Battlefront franchise, which is set for a summer 2015 release date.

“We’ve shown a trailer for one of the possible games that we’re going to make, Battlefront, and it’s got a lot of people very excited because it’s a very popular game from before. We have the team at DICE, building some early stages of various games and building them in Frostbite, so it will be very exciting gameplay and you’ll hear more about it in the years to come, but we’re very excited about the opportunity.”

I’m not a big fan of movie-based games, they’re often rushed, and sub-par games. I would rather have them revitalize franchises like Battlefront, KOTOR, and Unleashed while also building new ones.

Star Wars 1313 would be nice too……..

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.