JCC Gaming EA No Longer Has Exclusive License to Make Star Wars Games

I don't think it's simply Disney only wanting to work with big publishers and studios. The big issue is paying for the license. There is often a big licensing fee to use an IP as big as Star Wars. For smaller studios and publishers getting the license to make a game based off any popular IP takes a big cut into their profits and Star Wars is one of if not the biggest IP out there. Licensing eating up their profit margins is what killed Telltale games.
Disney and Lucasfilm Games will have to be pretty generous with the license for smaller companies to be able to make Star Wars games.

 

LULWUT?

 

No it isn't. At least, it's not the largest thing that brought them down. Telltale had a host of issues, such as spreading themselves incredibly thin, failing to innovate on any of their games, and some serious top down managerial issues.

And who has the option of changing that fee? I assume Disney and Lucasfilm, right? So, if they choose to keep the fee high, then they are choosing to also limit themselves to only AAA companies. It's the same thing.

 

Would be hilarious if Ubisoft just converted Assasins Creed Origins into Tatooine like they turned Far Cry 4 into cave man simulator. And I wouldn't even be mad, I really enjoyed cave man far cry.

@Outsourced your comparison of Star Wars games to Warhammer games is interesting. There have been some excellent Warhammer games, but they're also made for microtransactions. I think Total War Warhammer costs over $200 now if you want all the content for the main campaign.

 

What a weird interpretation of events.

 

Heck yes! Bring back LucasArts!!!!

But only if it can be like it used to be... so it’s probably impossible. They had a great run.

It was LucasFilm Games until 1990.

Can someone fact check me on this... The current LucasFilm LTD logo - the one added to the Star Wars Special Editions - started life as the LucasFilm Games logo in 1982. Where it says LTD now used to say GAMES.

The logo was so good in 1987 it became the logo for all of LucasFilm LTD and a new LucasFilm Games logo was used until the also great LucasArts L logo was created.

https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Lucasfilm_Games

https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Lucasfilm/Other

 

Please @ me when EA loses the exclusive NFL rights. Thx

 

That’s not how it went down. My partial understanding is during the 1980s LucasFilm Games was doing better and better. It was originally planned as of way to make video games based on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other LucasFilm movies in-house. Soon LucasFilm Games was creating it’s own original content that was highly successful. To embrace this new autonomous success creating original stories it was rebranded as LucasArts in 1990. And the next 8 years were huge with successful hit game after successful hit game.

Then the video game industry changed almost over night in 1998. PlayStation and consoles were more popular than computer games bringing 3D worlds to TVs. And the type of point and click games LucasArts pioneered fell out of favor. LucasArts had what was expected to be a huge hit - Grim Fandango - massively under preform.

An internal audit was done and the conclusion was they did nothing wrong. These games just weren’t financially viable anymore. All this happened while George Lucas was focusing most of his time and energy on the Prequels.

During this time LucasFilm was changing a lot and needed to become more focused and organized to keep everyone employed. LucasArts refocused on more stable Star Wars games. Non-Star Wars films* in development were abandoned, etc.

*LucasFilm was developing a feature length animated Secret of Monkey Island movie based in the video game series about pirates. This movie was shelved. Later all work on the project was sold to Walt Disney which adapted it into the Pirates of the Caribbean Film series. The writers of monkey Island were even brought in to work on scripts. The second Pirate movie is largely an adaptation of the Monkey Island animated film’s script.

 

Very good writeup, although I would like to add that where this leaves off is not where Lucasarts itself closed down. The period described here with Star Wars as the focus only lasted from around the mid 90s to the mid 2000s. After Jim Ward became president in 2004, the amount of games being produced was scaled down drastically from what it was before. Relationships became very strained with it's development partners like Free Radical and Factor 5, and the company as a whole seemed to take a nosedive when the new IPs it tried to launch underperformed, like Thrillville, Fracture, and Mercenaries.

 

I'd be glad to hear yours.

 

Disappointed that it’s Ubisoft. Last one of their games I truly enjoyed was Black Flag although I haven’t played any of the recent AC games. Watch Dogs and Valhalla apparently aren’t very good although I’ve heard great things about Phoenix.

It’s the division dev team? Dank farrick.

Okay. New IP might inspire them and allow them to really go all out. Given the recent disaster that has been CP77 I’m hoping that developers, and publishers, see the backlash and take the appropriate lessons forward.

 

Thank you. Very true. For me the real LucasArts, or LucasArts in its prime ends around 1999 or 2000. It’s not the same after the 90s. I also hardly played games after about 2002. So I don’t have first hand experience with the end other than it was like a completely different company than at it’s peak.

 

I think both EA and the NFL are to greedy for that even though it would help them

 

I'm pretty much the opposite actually. I grew up on Empire at War, Kotor, Battlefront, The Force Unleashed, Republic Commando, etc. I quite like the 90s Star Wars games, but I just missed out on that generation for nostalgia purposes.

 

That isn't to say they didn't make some great games in the 2000s. I thought Empire at War's add-on - the 3rd faction made of a new criminal mastermind - was rather cool. Republic Commando was great, but predictably ended on a never-resolved cliffhanger, much like the final X-Wing game. KOTOR as well - and I like KOTOR 2, even though it was apparent that it had been rushed and was incomplete.

 

I agree. I was to young at the time to play them but I was playing Battlefront 2 and 1 and TFU by the time I was 8 and played KOTOR 2 and 1 later never really got into the 1990s games

 

I’m happy they EA are still going to make Star Wars games too. I’m excited for the Fallen Order sequel whatever that may be and I’m hoping for a new battlefront.

 

That’s a good point - even in the later era LucasArts as mainly a Star Wars game maker they have epic hit Star Wars games.

My LucasArts era is the 90s. I loved how they could switch between Star Wars and other games. Anyone remember OutLaws? 1st person POV western shooter. They had a great bench of characters and titles that were primed to spin out into multiple series of games.

Mario, Link, and Sonic live in, but a lot of video game characters never made it into the 2010s.

 

Just remake Dark Forces with one of the levels a pod race.

 

It just occurred to me that the EA 10 year exclusivity deal may not have been cancelled early. The average time to develop games is around 2 years. Odds are Ubisoft won't have their new Star Wars game released till Fall of 2023 at the earliest.

Still it's good to know that deal with EA is not being extended and it appears the deal only effects release dates and not development.

I think we have to differentiate Lucasarts the game studio vs Lucasarts the publisher.

As a game studio developing their own games I'd say they reached their height during the 90's, but as a publisher they were grinding out games like crazy in the early to mid 2000's in large part do the release of the Prequels.

If I had to say which era is better remembered, especially in regards to Star Wars games I would have to say the latter. The shear amount of Star Wars games that came out is unrivaled by a longshot and games from that era are still often talked about and people clammer for sequels and remakes of those games. Rogue Squadron, Jedi Knight, Knights of the Old Republic, Bounty Hunter, Republic Commando, Empire at War, The Force Unleashed and even the Episode 3 tie in game is well regarded. There are more hit series alone from that era than games EA has made since getting the license.

 

I think if Dice goes for a cosmetic only system like they had in the later updated version of Battlefront 2 and took the lessons they learned they would have a game to rival BF2 (2005).

 

Ok 2021, this is better. But I still have my eye on you.

Now if only some of the old companies EA bought and killed could come back (Bioware...) that'd be great.

 

BioWare isn’t dead dead like Pandemic is. EA will continue to do what it does as long as they have all those juicy contracts with FIFA, NHL, NFL and the NBA. Hell they bought a company for 1.2 billion dollars recently. EA is going to continue to suck up and kill companies same with Microsoft. The video game industry is rapidly consolidating. We are just around for the ride.