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.
“We’ve done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren’t 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 don’t 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 we’ll 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. We’ll try to align those with that marketing, power the Disney has so it will get aligned with timing around the movies, but it won’t necessarily be aligned with the movie.”