Back in 2013 when Disney acquired the Star Wars IP from George Lucas, they began plotting out the franchise's future in entertainment mediums beyond films and that included video games. Eventually, the media giant came to the conclusion that the video game license for Star Wars would lie best in the hands of one of the biggest video game publishers, EA.
Since then we have received two new AAA Star Wars console/PC games that were both met with heavy controversy and criticism at release and EA canned a promising single-player game from the talented folks at Visceral before completely shutting down the studio. While there are more games in development from EA's teams like Respawn, fans are incredibly frustrated with the lack of respect and care put into the series that has had a resurgence in the last few years.
With that said, fans want to see Lucasfilm/Disney revoke EA's Star Wars license and have written up a petition that has garnered nearly 100,000 signatures already.
"EA have had the Star Wars video game license for the last 4 years, and in that time they've proven to their consumers that they honestly don't care about the gameplay experience or content, they'd rather rush out a game that will try and milk as much money out of consumers as possible." the opening of the lengthy petition reads. The petition is hoping to hit 150,000 signatures before being delivered to Lucasfilm in some form.
While contracts are likely in place until a certain date or a quota of Star Wars titles are released from EA, Disney or Lucasfilm could potentially buy out the contract and boot EA off in favor of a Marvel Games approach. Marvel Games has switched from letting Activision exclusively publish Marvel games to a more broader approach which allows studios like Insomniac, Crystal Dynamics, Eidos, Telltale, and others to make a variety of titles for their iconic characters.
Despite the lack of content in the first Star Wars Battlefront in 2015, it still sold well and while it's too soon to tell, the Star Wars branding and release of a new film will likely help Battlefront II units. If copies are selling and the game isn't completely abysmal, it's hard to say that Disney will just rush to pull the license away from EA's grasp.
EA has already begun facing consequences as their stock dropped $3.1 billion after the release of Battlefront II and they attracted the attention of a number of international governments with their microtransaction practices. It has quickly become the biggest controversies in gaming for 2017 due to how quickly it spread to mainstream outlets like CNN and more, EA has apologized but are still unsatisfied with the product they were delivered.
You can read/sign the petition by clicking here to visit the Change.org page.
[ResetERA]
