Today, Lucasfilm Games announced that it is entering into a partnership with Ubisoft to create an open world Star Wars game. The title will be developed by Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment, marking the first time that a company outside EA has produced a Star Wars game since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, ending almost eight years of exclusivity. A new Indiana Jones game is also in development, to be developed by Bethesda Game Studios, a newcomer to Lucasfilm and Disney properties.
Let’s start with Star Wars. The development of this new title is still very early – Massive is still recruiting for the project – so the details are sparse. Julian Gerighty, director of Division 2 and The Crew, will serve as the game’s creative director, and the title will use Massive’s Snowdrop engine. In addition, Lucasfilm Games has revealed nothing about the characters or configurations of the Star Wars universe that the game will feature.
This announcement follows yesterday’s news that Lucasfilm is partnering with Bethesda to create an Indiana Jones title, Lucasfilm’s first non-Star Wars AAA game in years. The move marks a seismic shift to Lucasfilm’s approach to games, expanding the tent for developers who want to create games using Lucasfilm franchises, especially in the Star Wars universe.
Although EA previously suggested that the company would have exclusivity in Star Wars games for 10 years, it appears that this was incorrect or time ran out ahead of time. (Lucasfilm would not confirm for WIRED in any way.) Even so, EA will continue to make games in the future, but Lucasfilm Games is free to look for other partners.
“EA has been and will continue to be a very strategic and important partner for us now and in the future,” Sean Shoptaw, senior vice president of Global Games and Interactive Experiences at Disney, told WIRED. “But we feel that there is room for others.”
In 2013, Disney laid off 150 LucasArts employees, ending internal game development. The reasoning at the time was that the move would minimize “the company’s risk, while reaching a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games,” according to a statement the company made to The Hollywood Reporter at the time.
However, in the following years, EA’s exclusivity agreement was criticized as a bottleneck for this goal. In addition to some small mobile or VR games, the number of EA’s top Star Wars games since 2013 can be counted on one side. By allowing more developers to present their ideas for games, Lucasfilm hopes to diversify the titles it offers.
“I think if you look at the gaming scene, you will see that there is such a diverse population of people around the world who make games,” explains Shoptaw. “For us to capture the amount of quality that exists in the world and get to the market quickly, it would be a great challenge for us to do this internally.”
As with previous EA games, any new Star Wars game will be part of the same canon as Star Wars and the continuity shared by all films and TV shows produced since the acquisition of Disney. James Waugh, Lucasfilm’s vice president of content and franchise strategy, explains that while this means that games don’t always connect directly to content from other media, the possibility is at stake.
“I think people who make mistakes sometimes are like, ‘Oh, so have to connect to everything else. And that’s not necessarily what we’re always saying, ”Waugh told WIRED. “It will happen if it is right for this story.”
This new, non-exclusive arrangement for Star Wars games – like the rest of Lucasfilm’s franchise library – leaves the door open for developers to come up with their own story ideas for Lucasfilm Games. “There is no shortage of people knocking on our door, wanting to play with our toys,” Douglas Reilly, vice president of Lucasfilm Games, told WIRED.
Among this camp is Todd Howard. The famous director of Skyrim (among many other games) is also a great Indiana Jones fan. “What has been most inspiring about the Indy game in particular is that it is a passionate project for Todd Howard,” explained Waugh. “He came up with a point of view and a story that he really believes in.”
Of course, these franchises are still, in Reilly’s words, Lucasfilm toys. “Ultimately, we have final approval on everything,” explained Reilly. While developers – including, but not exclusively, EA – may be free to present story ideas to the company, these developers will still be playing inside the Disney theater.
Keeping players and developers within this gaming house seems to be the ultimate goal of Lucasfilm Games, which has been renamed. More and more, video games compete for leisure and entertainment time with cinema and TV. Disney has a long history of dominating cinema and TV, competing for the eyes of the consumer, but lacks the same level of experience with video games. Harnessing the talent of outside studios could mean that consumers would spend much more hours a day within the company’s broad franchises than if Disney relied solely on movies and TV.
A single game based on a story can take dozens of hours. An open world game, like the kind that Ubisoft is making with Lucasfilm Games, can take hundreds of hours, depending on how long the player wants to explore. “It really explains why we are doing what we are doing, because these are massive entertainment experiences that last many hours, much longer than a movie,” explained Shoptaw.