Just a little while ago, we reported on the announcement of a new game in the Star Wars franchise which will be developed by Massive Entertainment, a division of Ubisoft. Sifting through the lines of Wiredwho broke the news, the announcement also contains other valuable information.
The news that we report, in fact, was in the air, given the current collaboration between Lucasfilm and Ubisoft for a game, but Wired concretizes the theory: Electronic Arts no longer has exclusive video games from the Star Wars franchise.
After Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the major immediately signed a colossal commercial agreement with Electronic Arts for the exclusive exploitation of the Star Wars videogame franchise. At that moment some expected projects such as Star Wars 1313 were canceled, and the American giant immediately gave way to a revival of the galaxy far away in the world of video games with various projects.
According to what EA itself declared at the time of the announcement of the partnership, the agreement should have lasted 10 years, and therefore until 2022 – as stated Wired, Disney then terminated the deal 2 years early.
Relations between the two giants have not always been idyllic. Under the control of EA, Star Wars has returned to our screens with 4 major new iterations: Battlefront, Battlefront II, Jedi: Fallen Order and the recent Squadrons, air combat simulator aboard the Rebellion and Empire ships, ai which are then added some decidedly minor productions.
While the latest games have been popular, the same cannot be said for the two DICE shooters. The first Battlefront had been poorly digested by fans due to the scarcity of content, but with Battlefront IIin 2017, they arrived an avalanche of problems for EA due to the massive use of microtransactions, which, according to the reports of the time, annoyed Disney not a little. Today, as we have been repeating for some time, Star Wars: Battlefront II is a very different game and full of free content, however the initial stain of microtransactions greatly ruined the launch of the title.
Added to this are very obscure pages of EA management, such as the tragic closure of Visceral Games in 2017 and the consequent cancellation of a single player Star Wars game that the creators of Dead Space were working on.
The closure of the exclusive partnership, however, does not mean that Electronic Arts will no longer have the ability to create Star Wars video gamesOn the contrary: Sean Shoptaw, senior vice president of Global Games and Interactive Experiences at Disney, has confided that EA will continue to work on the franchise in the future, despite the major has wanted to open the universe created by George Lucas to other companies.
EA has been and will continue to be a very strategic and important partner for us now and in the future. But we felt like there was room for others.
Speaking of the new Ubisoft game, Shoptaw has therefore confirmed that there is no new exclusive partnership between Disney and Ubisoft, and that Lucasfilm Games will be happy to give the opportunity to all developers in the world to propose their ideas for new works set in the Star Wars canon.
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