EA looking beyond movies for Star Wars games

Electronic Arts has reaffirmed its stance on Star Wars games based on the films. That is, the studio has no plans to make games based on the upcoming trilogy of films or any of the franchise films, be it past, present, or future.

"We've done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing a movie game, i.e., game based on the movie," said EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen during a presentation at the UBS Global Technology Conference (via Seeking Alpha).

"The beauty of the Star Wars franchise is that it's so broad and so deep, you don't have to do a movie game, you can do a game that's very focused on the world that's been created around Star Wars."

In the same speech, Jorgensen also revealed that EA's Star Wars licensing deal with Disney will run for 10 years.

"We struck what we believe is a fantastic deal which allows us to be able to build games in many different genres across multiple types of platforms over ten years and we'll leverage the strength of the Disney marketing associated with the Star Wars properties both in movies and other things that they may do over the timeframe.

"We'll try to align those with that marketing power Disney has so it will get aligned with timing around the movies, but it won't necessarily be aligned with the movie," he reiterated.

EA has said it has plans for Visceral Games, BioWare, and DICE to develop Star Wars games. DICE has already been revealed to be working on a new Star Wars Battlefront game, which was announced at E3 in June with a teaser trailer. The other studios' projects remain a mystery.

"We have the team in DICE building some early stages of various games and building them in Frostbite, so it will be a very exciting gameplay and you'll hear more about it in the years to come," Jorgensen said. "And so, we're excited and we think that it will be a great 2015 and 2016 when we'll start to see the emergence of possibly the Star Wars titles along with the Star Wars movies that will start to come out in late calendar 2015 or fiscal 2016."