Circa drie weken geleden brachten wij jullie het nieuws dat Electronic Arts een exclusieve licentie had gekocht van Disney om Star Wars-games te mogen maken. De studio’s die verantwoordelijk zullen zijn voor de Star Wars-games bleken DICE, Visceral en BioWare. Uit een financiële bespreking van EA is nu gebleken dat niet EA, maar Disney aanzet heeft gegeven tot deze deal. BioWare heeft zich namens EA de afgelopen jaren al bezig gehouden met Star Wars: The Old Republic en vanwege deze historie zou Disney EA benaderd hebben om de Star Wars-gamefranchises levend te houden:
I think what everyone knows is that we have had a relationship with Lucas on Star Wars for the MMO game we built last two years ago through our BioWare business. So we had some history with Star Wars. Because of that history Disney approach us as a partner and tried to keep alive the Star Wars video game franchise.EA zag dit als een buitenkansje, aangezien Star Wars-games historisch gezien op behoorlijk wat populariteit kunnen rekenen. De mogelijkheid om bijvoorbeeld een vervolg op Star Wars: Battlefront te maken, sprak EA dan ook aan:
Historically, it’s been a very strong franchise, it’s been a very huge level of excitement around some of the historical Star Wars video games, and the opportunity for our teams to get the chance to build the next generation of games is something we find very exciting. We’ll build those not just through our BioWare studio, but also through DICE who builds Battlefield, and through Visceral, the studio based in Redwood Shores.And the opportunity to build a new Battlefront for example, which was one of the very popular Star Wars games, or some of the other traditional games that were made, very exciting, and to do those along side the promotion we know Disney is going to do to sell the Star Wars franchise, through their own organization, through movies, through amusement parks, through merchandizing, we sense a huge opportunity to tailgate on some of that promotion. These aren’t movie games, per say, these are stand alone games, but obviously they would come out near the movies and be able to tailgate off some of the buzz that will be created around the new Star Wars movies.