This year has seen two highly-rated and beloved Star Wars games in the XCOM-like Zero Company, and the Burnout-like Galactic Racer. And both were made by independent studios rather than much bigger companies, which have typically taken on Star Wars games in recent years, such as Ubisoft with Star Wars Outlaws and EA with Star Wars Battlefront.
The change, it turns out, was intentional. Lucasfilm Games bigwig Douglas Reilly told The Game Business that the Star Wars franchise stewards are now much more open about who to give the license to.
“We’re obviously a licensing business,” Reilly explained, “so we’re not the publishers any more of products. Our goal is to try and find a publishing partner and a developer or a publisher and a developer. I think we’ve tried to be more flexible about who we’re willing to take pitches from. Good ideas can come from a lot of different places.”
This is a fairly recent change in Lucasfilm Games’ strategy. The license holder was previously happy to sell a single publisher exclusive rights to Star Wars games, which previously was EA. That approach has often been criticised for limiting the creative output, be it in the number of games released or genres that get chosen. That dearth is something Star Wars fans truly felt when EA had exclusive rights to Star Wars, but this new approach allows for a much more varied pool of games and more frequent releases.
To that end, Reilly revealed there is no particular tier of publisher that Lucasfilm Games targets, saying, “There are some hurdles; we have a high quality bar and we want to make sure they’re excellent experiences. And that means typically you work with more experienced teams than new teams.” However, that doesn’t mean you “necessarily [have to] be a top-five publisher to make a great Star Wars game”.
Reilly also teased what we can expect from Star Wars games in the future. “We’re exploring all kinds of things, large and small,” he said, “with partners that I think are going to continue to surprise folks who are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a thing with them. That might be interesting to see how that turns out.'”
The number of currently announced Star Wars games remains small. Outside of Quantic Dream’s long-in-development Star Wars Eclipse, the only other game that’s understood to be in the works is the third game in Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi series. Former Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic lead Casey Hudson is currently working on a follow-up, Fate of the Old Republic, as Saber Interactive continues to insist the Knights of the Old Republic Remake remains in development.