At the recent UBS Global Technology Conference, EA Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Blake J. Jorgensen spoke about the company’s upcoming games and spoke at length about their deal with Disney. The catch? They won’t be producing games based on the individual films that Disney and Lucasfilm have lined up.
“Weve done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we werent doing a movie game i.e., game based on the movie. The beauty of the Star Wars franchise is that it’s so broad and so deep, you dont 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,” he said.
“We had a long relationship obviously with Lucas on the original Star Wars and when Disney took over Lucas, they really wanted to maintain a video game business around Star Wars. They felt it was very valuable and a lot of people loved the games historically. And so they came to us because of our partnership and they knew that we could help them develop really great games and 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 10 years and well 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. Well try to align those with that marketing, power the Disney has so it will get aligned with timing around the movies, but it wont necessarily be aligned with the movie.”
Jorgensen also mentioned that the people at DICE are still working on a new game in the “Battlefront” franchise, which is slated for a summer 2015 release date.
“Weve shown a trailer for one of the possible games that were going to make, Battlefront, and its got a lot of people very excited because its a very popular game from before. We have the team at DICE, building some early stages of various games and building them in Frostbite, so it will be very exciting gameplay and youll hear more about it in the years to come, but were very excited about the opportunity.”
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