EA not looking to make Star Wars movie tie-ins

The deal between EA and Disney to make Star Wars games will last a decade, EA has revealed, adding that the publisher has no plans to make tie-in games to accompany the theatrical release of Star Wars: Episode VII in 2015.

"We've done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing a movie game--a game based on the movie," said EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen last night at a UBS conference.

"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."

Star Wars: Battlefront, the reboot of the dormant FPS series being handled by DICE, is the only announced title as part of EA's new relationship, although Visceral Games and BioWare will also make new Star Wars games.

"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."

Jorgensen said it would try to align its Star Wars titles around movie releases, but not necessarily with the movies themselves. "We'll try to align those with the marketing power Disney has so it will get aligned with timings around the movies, but it won't necessarily be aligned with the [2015] movie," said Jorgensen.