EA Wins Publishing Rights to Star Wars Games

This is an unexpected turn of events. EA Games has announced that they have acquired the publishing/developing rights for games based on Star Wars from Disney. This breaking news follows the announcement that Disney shut down LucasArts and all internally developed Star Wars project to instead pursue licensing the brand out to the highest bidder.

That bidder, it seems, is none other than EA.

According to the announcement, EA will develop and publish Star Wars games as part of a multi-year deal with Disney. The games will be developed for the “core gaming audience” and will span all interactive platforms and genres. Disney will retain the rights to develop Star Wars games for mobile, social, tablet and online spaces.

EA mentions that Battlefield developer DICE, Dead Space developer Visceral Games and BioWare, the team currently working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, all have Star Wars games in the pipeline.

“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” said Frank Gibeau, EA Label’s President. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”

Now we wait and see if EA will resurrect Star Wars 1313, as Disney made it clear the project is not dead, it’s just on ice.

While you think on the possibilities of what EA can do with Star Wars, why not also look back at what LucasArts accomplished with Star Wars and their other popular brands….


Erik Norris is the Gaming Editor for CraveOnline and co-host of Watch Us Play and the Next Gen News podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @Regular_Erik.

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