Disney's different take on EA's lack of Star Wars games

After days of sustained criticism from numerous quarters over EA's handling of the Star Wars license, IP owner Disney has finally weighed in... and their take on the situation was surprising, to say the least. As reported by WIRED:

One of the most uneasy partnerships in games is the one between publisher EA and Disney. For several years now, since the shuttering of LucasArts games, EA has had an exclusive deal with Disney to make Star Wars console titles. That's all well and good—except for the fact that none of those games have been unmitigated successes and there haven't exactly been a lot of them, either. As a result, many have speculated that Disney's deal with EA might not be long for this world—but apparently the Mouse House is fine with things as they are.

In a recent earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger replied to questions about the company's relationship with EA by saying that the deal works well for both parties. "We've had good relationships with some of those we're licensing to, notably EA and the relationship on the Star Wars properties, and we're probably going to stay on that side of the business and put our capital elsewhere," Iger said. "We're good at making movies and television shows and theme parks and cruise ships and the like, we've just never managed to demonstrate much skill on the publishing side of games." Welp, at least Disney is happy. Because, uh, no one else is.

Now, I'll admit that I was as surprised as anybody, at first. Even if Disney didn't have a great video game track record, LucasArts did, at least up to the point when Disney acquired and then gutted their operation. Surely, given how aggressively Disney planned to push the boundaries of the Star Wars franchise, it would have made more sense to keep that team in place, along with their solid track record of doing exactly what Disney needed, rather than reducing them to a skeleton crew that would struggle to oversee anything much... and then outsourcing all responsibility for this huge part of the Star Wars portfolio.

After taking a few days to think about it, though, I've come around to Iger's way of thinking, and not only because Disney doesn't have a great track record when it comes to video games. EA's problems putting out decent Star Wars games are only one symptom of Disney's larger problem: that their entire strategy for Star Wars has been wrong-headed, basically from the very start.

First, the planned pace of Disney's Star Wars releases appears to have been simply too aggressive. True, the flopping of Solo: A Star Wars Story could easily be partly attributed to the boycott espoused by the Star Wars fandom's most toxic and misogynistic elements, but I don't believe that Star Wars fandom as a whole is that virulently toxic or blindly bigoted. After three lacklustre prequels, two more main story films (both of which received decidedly mixed responses from fans), and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a lot of Star Wars fans were simply suffering from Star Wars fatigue.

Report: EA removed MTs from SWBF2 because Disney insisted

When I first heard that EA had announced the temporary removal of gacha monetization from Star Wars Battlefront II, my immediate knee-jerk reaction was, "I'll bet that someone from Disney made a phone call," and I wasn't the only one. EA, after all, was clearly intending to weather the storm and cash in on the game's gacha, but Disney was facing a wave of negative Star Wars-related PR with The Last Jedi's release only a month away; the reversal really only made sense if it happened at Disney's instigation.

Well, it seems that's exactly what happened, according to SegmentNext:

Disney might have saved EA from an even bigger catastrophe before the game released, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz. Apparently, Disney called EA to let them know how displeased they were about the handling of the Battlefront 2 microtransactions.

Battlefront 2 had a rather disastrous launch after it came out that EA was adding in a great deal of grinding to Battlefront 2 in order to unlock well-known heroes like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Fritz apparently wrote an article that talked about how Disney contacted EA to let them know about Disney CEO Bob Igner’s “worry” about their handling of the game.

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This isn’t the only Star Wars game that EA has mucked up recently either, after they canned production of a Star Wars game developed by Visceral Games that was originally going to be single-player and story-driven in favor of a multiplayer-focused game, which sparked its own debate about how relevant single-player games were in this day and age with games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and more being given as pro-single player examples.

Lucasfilm eventually released a short, boilerplate PR statement confirming that they "support EA’s decision," but the simple reality is that EA probably wouldn't have made this decision if Disney hadn't weighed in. EA may be one of the biggest companies in videogames right now, but they're minnows compared to Disney... and Disney own Star Wars. If EA fuck up badly enough, Disney can just pull the license, and the suddenness of EA's reversal on their Star Wars gacha is suggestive of that being basically what EA were really afraid of here.

Meanwhile, the temporary removal of gacha from SWBF2 seems to have some too late to prevent some sort of regulatory action, with French regulators also investigating whether gacha systems would require regulation or consumer protections. With Belgium also looking into regulating loot boxes, it's looking more and more like EA's unseemly over-reach on the issue may just have precipitated exactly the kind of regulatory response that they were desperate to avoid.

Meanwhile, SWBF2's is garnering pretty poor reviews across the board, with a Metacritic score of only 69, and a user score of only 0.8 (the original SWBF managed a MC score of 75, with an average user score of 3.5, by comparison). And, for a wonder, its sales appear to be following suit, actually reflecting of this poor critical and consumer reception, at least in the UK.


The Know has a decent roundup of the latest developments:

So, have gamers finally had enough of this shit? Are they finally voting with their feet and wallets? Only time will tell, but the fact that it's finally happened, even once, gives me hope for humanity.