EA And Disney Enter 10 Year Deal For ‘Star Wars’ Gaming Rights

EA have secures a 10 year deal with Disney to the gaming rights to their Star Wars franchise. EA‘s executive vice president Blake Jorgensen made a statement to investors saying that the games will move beyond movie footage and focus on larger aspects of the franchise mythology and that the partnership is set for 10 years.

The news of the deal broke just a month after Disney announced their closure of LucasArts, their video game studio under the Lucasfilm subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

At the UBS Global Technology Conference Blake Jorgensen 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 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’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.”

The first Star Wars game to be released by EA is expected to be Star Wars: Battlefront, due 2015.