Much like a Sith Lord in a giant outer space death machine, EA has asserted their force choke hold on the Star Wars game license for 10 years. EA executive vice president Blake Jorgensen recently divulged some details from this deal at a technology conference, including that the games being made by EA are not adaptations of the new films being made by J.J. Abrams.
The only game announced so far (besides the adorable Star Wars: Tiny Deathstar) has been DICE teasing a new Star Wars Battlefront at E3 with this trailer:
The game is being targeted for a 2015 release date to coincide with the December 18, 2015 release date of the new film. It hasn’t been disclosed how much EA has actually paid for the Star Wars game license, so it’s kind of surprising (and un-EA like) for them to just not make some sloppy movie tie in games. Jorgensen had this to say:
Yes, so I mean 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.
Personally, I’m still bitter about Disney shutting down the legendary LucasArts game division… but who am I kidding… I’ll probably play the hell out of these games.
