Today, Lucasfilm Games announced that it has partnered with Ubisoft to create an open world Star Wars game. The title will be developed by Massive Entertainment of Ubisoft, which is the first time a non-EA company has produced a Star Wars game since acquiring Disney’s Lucasfilm in 2012, ending nearly eight years of exclusivity. There’s also a new Indiana Jones game that will be developed by Bethesda Game Studios, a newcomer to Lucasfilm and Disney’s properties.
Let’s start with Star Wars. The development of this new title is still very early – Massive is still recruiting for the project, even so details are sparse. Julian Gerighty, Director of The Section 2 and The crew, will serve as the game’s creative director, and the title uses Massive’s Snowdrop engine. In addition, Lucasfilm Games has not revealed anything about the characters or settings in the Star Wars universe that the game will feature.
This announcement follows yesterday’s news that Lucasfilm is working with Bethesda to create an Indiana Jones title, the first non-Star Wars AAA game from Lucasfilm in years. The move is a seismic shift for Lucasfilm’s approach to gaming, enlarging the tent for developers looking to create games with Lucasfilm franchises, especially in the Star Wars universe.
While EA had earlier suggested that the company would have ten years of exclusivity on Star Wars games, it looks like it was wrong or that the watch runs out early. (Lucasfilm would not confirm any way for WIRED.) EA will continue to make games in the future, but Lucasfilm Games is free to seek out other partners.
“EA has been and will continue to be a very strategic and important partner for us,” Sean Shoptaw, senior vice president of Global Games and Interactive Experiences at Disney, told WIRED. “But we felt there was room for others.”
In 2013, Disney laid off 150 employees at LucasArts, which ended the development of their own games. The reasoning at the time was that the move “would reduce the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games”, according to a statement issued by the company to The Hollywood Reporter at that point.
In the years that followed, the EA exclusivity agreement was criticized as a bottleneck for the purpose. Apart from a few small mobile or VR games, the number of major Star Wars games from EA since 2013 can be counted on one hand. By allowing more developers to bring in their ideas for games, Lucasfilm hopes to diversify the titles it offers.
“I think if you look at the game landscape, it’s such a diverse population of people around the world that make games,” Shoptaw explains. “If we are going to capture the amount of quality that exists in the world and be able to be on the market quickly, it is a big challenge for us to do that internally.”
As with previous EA games, any new Star Wars games will be part of the same Star Wars canon and continuity shared in all the movies and TV shows produced since the Disney acquisition. James Waugh, Lucasfilm’s VP of franchise content and strategy, explains that while this means that games are not always directly linked to content in other media, the possibility is on the table.
‘I think where people see it is like,’ Oh, then it’s has to join all the others. And that’s not necessarily what we always say, ”Waugh told WIRED. “It will happen if it’s ready for the story.”
This new non-exclusive arrangement for Star Wars games – as well as the rest of Lucasfilm’s franchise library – leaves the door open for developers to submit their own story ideas to Lucasfilm Games. “We have no shortage of people knocking on our door and wanting to play with our toys,” Douglas Reilly, VP of Lucasfilm Games, told WIRED.
Under the camp is Todd Howard. The renowned director of Skyrim (among many other games) is also a great Indiana Jones fan. “What was particularly inspiring about the Indy game is that it’s a passion project for Todd Howard,” Waugh explained. “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’s toys. “Ultimately, we have final approval on everything,” Reilly explained. While developers, including but no longer exclusively at EA, have the freedom to give stories for stories to the company, the developers will still play in the Disney playhouse.
Keeping both gamers and developers inside the playhouse seems to be the ultimate goal of the newly remade Lucasfilm Games. Video games are increasingly competing for relaxation and entertainment with film and TV. Disney has a long history of dominating film and TV that compete for the eyeballs of the consumer, but it does not have the same experience with video games. Taking advantage of the talent of outdoor studios, it could mean that consumers spend far more hours of the day in the vast franchises than Disney would rely on film and TV.
A single story-driven game can take decades. An open-world game, like the kind Ubisoft makes with Lucasfilm Games, could potentially take hundreds of hours, depending on how long a player wants to explore. “It really leans into why we do what we do, because it’s massive entertainment experiences that last for many hours, much longer than film,” Shoptaw explained.