You can expect more Star Wars by EA in the coming years. According to EA CEO Andrew Wilson, the company has a ‘tremendous relationship’ with Disney and LucasArts. He also confirmed that EA aims to fully capitalize on the Star Wars exclusive license and will ‘double down’ on the games. According to EA, Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2, Jedi Fallen Order, and mobile game Galaxy of Heroes were massive successes.
“We've got the combination of great IP, great development expertise and experience and success from us across genres, across platforms, across business models. And we've got new generations [of fans] coming to the IP all the time,” Wilson said to Gamespot. “So our expectation is we think there continues to be a really really strong opportunity in an around that relationship and that IP going forward.”
EA is also excited about its recently announced game, Star Wars: Squadrons. Squadrons is not a full-priced AAA game, and from the previous trailer we saw, we know that the game is mostly focused on space combat. The game can be fully played in both VR and non-VR modes. It will only cost $40 and will not have any kind of microtransactions. I am still hesitant about the latter part, but the same promise was made for Jedi: Fallen Order and the promise was kept. Fallen Order didn’t have any kind of loot boxes or even cosmetic microtransactions.
The last major Star Wars game to have these anti-consumer practices was Battlefront 2. The loot boxes in the game were so predatory and pay-to-win that it started a massive backlash from the community. The response from EA also became the most disliked comment in Reddit history. Even Disney had to come forward and assure the investors that their relationship with EA is good. Due to this, EA made changes to the loot boxes, and now Battlefront 2 is actually a good game thanks to the massive amount of free post-launch content it received.
So, there is still some hope that EA won’t abuse the Star Wars license and will treat it with respect. EA also said that their relationship with Disney is so good that they even have the rights to make their own characters and stories in the Star Wars universe. Fallen Order had new characters and is now considered canon by Disney.
It looks like we will be getting a lot more Star Wars game, not that I am not complaining. Maybe my hopes for an open world story-centric Star Wars game isn't that far-fetched.
