EA's Star Wars deal with Disney to last ten years; won't just be movie games

While EA had earlier signed an exclusivity deal for Star Wars games with Disney, it is only set to last ten years, according to CFO Blake Jorgensen. He said that EA’s Star Wars games won’t necessarily be “movie games,” a phrase which has a lot of stigma attached because of the low quality of the typical licensed movie game.

According to Polygon, Jorgensen said during the UBS Global Technology Conference that rather than just the movies, the games will come from all over the expanded fiction, such as the novels and comics_. “The beauty of the Star Wars franchise is it’s so broad and so deep you don’t have to do a movie game,”_ Jorgensen said. “You can do a game that’s very focused on the world that’s been created around Star Wars.”

Pretend that the Imperial March theme from Star Wars is playing as you read this

The first major game as part of EA and Disney’s deal will be Star Wars: Battlefront 3. The game is being developed by DICE and will be using the Frostbite 3 engine. The studio is apparently “building some early stages of various games” in the engine.

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“We struck what we believe is a fantastic deal,” Jorgensen said, “which allows us to be able to build games in many different genres across multiple types of platforms over 10 years and will leverage the strength of the Disney marketing associated with the Star Wars properties, both in movies and other things that they made do over the timeframe.

“We’ll try to align those with that marketing power that Disney has, but it won’t necessarily be aligned with the movies.”