StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'll start off by reposting an image on Reddit from Leon501st (found here), since it does a great job illustrating the main thrust of this thread.


So, on the heels of the announcement that EA cancelled yet another Star Wars game, one that was being built using the leftovers of one that Visceral was developing before EA unceremoniously shuttered the studio, I've been seeing more and more discontent over the rather flagrant mishandling of the Star Wars license by EA. It got me to realize that, for all the back and forth here over the quality of the movies, I have not seen a lot said about the absolute dearth of Star Wars video games since Disney took over. The only ones that have been released at all were about as popular as arsenic hard candies, since they were two incredibly similar multiplayer team shooters that came to epitomize some of the worst qualities of the AAA game industry (like releasing unfinished and predatory monetization practices). I actually think that the poor state of modern Star Wars video games may actually be doing more to undermine the property than divisiveness over the quality of the new movies. I mean, it's not like Star Wars hasn't had to deal with unpopular movies in the franchise before, and it actually managed to weather that storm pretty well in the past.

There are rumors that EA's CEO doesn't like making Star Wars games (the licensing contract was made by his predecessor) because the company has to share creative control with Disney, and I've even heard rumblings that Bioware has been champing at the bit to do KOTOR 3, but EA won't let them. This has in turn been increasing calls for Disney to find some way to terminate their contract with EA, and to go back to the LucasArts model of collaborating with a more diverse array of developers instead of marrying themselves to a single publisher. I personally think this is a good idea, since although that might result in a lot of bad games, we've seen that giving exclusive licensing rights to a publisher that has its own priorities can just create a situation where there are fewer bad games simply because there aren't any getting made at all.

So, any thoughts on the argument that the current state of Star Wars video games is damaging to the long-term health of the property?

EA basically buried SW gaming. Fully agree with the argument as put forth.

Do not know what else to say.

Civil War Man wrote: ↑2019-01-24 01:38pmI actually think that the poor state of modern Star Wars video games may actually be doing more to undermine the property than divisiveness over the quality of the new movies. I mean, it's not like Star Wars hasn't had to deal with unpopular movies in the franchise before, and it actually managed to weather that storm pretty well in the past.

I'd actually contend that Star Wars hasn't had to deal with an unpopular movie before, at least not in this way or to this extent. Divisive, yes, but that's an important distinction. The Prequels had lots of very vicious and vocal critics, but also large audiences and vocal defenders. Ditto the main Sequel trilogy films thus far. The only (live action) Star Wars movie that is an actual financial failure is Solo.

Edit: As to the actual topic of games- I've known for a while that EA has a bad reputation, but I hadn't realized they'd fucked Star Wars gaming that hard. Only two fucking titles in six years?

I honestly don't know why Disney doesn't try and get the licence away from them. If nothing else, Disney likes money, and doing jack and shit with the license isn't making Disney money, or at least not as much money as they could be making.

Their meagre production is also a sad commentary on the extent to which shooters have come to dominate gaming over other genres. I've griped before about not having had a Star Wars strategy game since Empire at War, but... yeah.

The Romulan Republic wrote: ↑2019-01-24 03:44pm I honestly don't know why Disney doesn't try and get the licence away from them. If nothing else, Disney likes money, and doing jack and shit with the license isn't making Disney money, or at least not as much money as they could be making.

My understanding of the situation is that Disney is not super interested in gaming outside of merchandising, so they're mostly content to let EA do its own thing. They don't do a whole lot of games outside of like, crappy little mobile things for kids, spinoffs of movies (I can guarantee there were probably racing games based upon the Cars movies, for example), and spinoffs of TV shows like, I dunno, Sofia the First learning games or whatever (I have two little girls, I can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Sofia the First).

So when it comes to contracts with big name professional game production companies... might as well let the experts handle it, right? And, frankly, EA wouldn't be around if it wasn't very good at funneling money towards its stockholders. As long as it keeps doing that, the people in charge have little to no incentive to really care about the quality of the games being produced.

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-01-24 02:37pm EA basically buried SW gaming. Fully agree with the argument as put forth.

Do not know what else to say.

The blame can be placed on Disney and Kennedy. They shut down Lucasart instead of taking advantage of an in-house studio to pump out SW games.

I don't think Kennedy fully understood how to manage SW as a franchise beyond making successful movies.

Jim Sterling did a video on this a few days ago.

Has a company licensing their IP to a single publisher ever gone well ?

Elheru Aran wrote: ↑2019-01-24 04:08pm So when it comes to contracts with big name professional game production companies... might as well let the experts handle it, right? And, frankly, EA wouldn't be around if it wasn't very good at funneling money towards its stockholders. As long as it keeps doing that, the people in charge have little to no incentive to really care about the quality of the games being produced.

And that it would have worked. If it wasn't for shareholders demanding higher returns on investment each year*. Leading to publishers moving their focus towards fewer games with more microtransactions. Disney might not of minded that. But they probably didn't like when legislators started talking about BF2 being a Star Wars themed casino aimed at children.

*And being constantly told that games selling really well are selling below expectations.

Civil War Man wrote: ↑2019-01-24 01:38pm There are rumors that EA's CEO doesn't like making Star Wars games (the licensing contract was made by his predecessor) because the company has to share creative control with Disney,

By creative control, I'm thinking he's annoyed that Disney won't let him stick lootboxes in Star Wars games. EA can ignore Belgian law telling them that lootboxes are illegal, but they can't ignore the mouse.

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-01-24 06:00pm

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-01-24 02:37pm EA basically buried SW gaming. Fully agree with the argument as put forth.

Do not know what else to say.

The blame can be placed on Disney and Kennedy. They shut down Lucasart instead of taking advantage of an in-house studio to pump out SW games.

I don't think Kennedy fully understood how to manage SW as a franchise beyond making successful movies.

I've noticed you (and others) have a habit of blaming a lot of things on Kennedy. So I'd like to see you cite specific reasons why you feel this failure is Kennedy's, specifically.

Elheru Aran wrote: ↑2019-01-24 04:08pm

The Romulan Republic wrote: ↑2019-01-24 03:44pm I honestly don't know why Disney doesn't try and get the licence away from them. If nothing else, Disney likes money, and doing jack and shit with the license isn't making Disney money, or at least not as much money as they could be making.

My understanding of the situation is that Disney is not super interested in gaming outside of merchandising, so they're mostly content to let EA do its own thing.

As an example of this, look at how many Marvel inspired games there have been in the period where the MCU has been owning multiplexes up and down the nation.

The answer is fuck all barring a facebook game or two and the desultory attempt that was MvCI.

Disney are not terribly interested in games as a vehicle for their licenses.

The Romulan Republic wrote: ↑2019-01-25 12:32am

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-01-24 06:00pm

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-01-24 02:37pm EA basically buried SW gaming. Fully agree with the argument as put forth.

Do not know what else to say.

The blame can be placed on Disney and Kennedy. They shut down Lucasart instead of taking advantage of an in-house studio to pump out SW games.

I don't think Kennedy fully understood how to manage SW as a franchise beyond making successful movies.

I've noticed you (and others) have a habit of blaming a lot of things on Kennedy. So I'd like to see you cite specific reasons why you feel this failure is Kennedy's, specifically.

And I think you are being overly defensive of Kennedy all the time. It was under her leadership that shut down Lucasart. She effectively killed the studio even though a SW game was close to completion prior to the acquisition by Disney.

Last September, when executives at LucasFilm—the parent company of LucasArts—found out that Disney had signed an agreement to purchase the company, things got murky. LucasFilm froze all hiring and new game announcements, our source says. They had planned to announce First Assault and launch a closed beta by the end of September—which explains the Xbox listing leak on October 1—and First Assault was supposed to be out this spring.

https://kotaku.com/leaked-star-wars-gam ... ii-5989910

“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games," LucasArts parent company LucasFilm said in a statement. "As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/kotaku.com ... 473749/amp

She is also the one who make the statement about how great EA was as a company to produce Star Wars games. If she thinks EA is a company that is actually able to pump out a wide variety of video games, I doubt she has seriously done any serious research into EA as a company beyond looking at financial figures.

“Our number one objective was to find a developer who could consistently deliver our fans great Star Wars games for years to come,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “When we looked at the talent of the teams that EA was committing to our games and the quality of their vision for Star Wars, the choice was clear.

https://www.starwars.com/news/electroni ... ars-gaming

I do get annoyed when people say we can't blame Kennedy even though she is the leader of Lucasfilm. Leaders are supposed to take blame for any mistakes they made, which in this case is shutting down Lucasart and selecting EA as a choice of company. Sure, she might be influenced by the top Disney execs, but Lucasart was still under her directly with games that are almost completed.

She has never strike me as someone interested in managing the franchise aspect of Star Wars besides the movies. Her primarily focus is solely on the production of the films, which can be understandable but that also mean she's not a good successor to who George Lucas was as a company founder. The strength of the Star Wars franchise lies less in the movies on their own, but in its ability to generate stories of a much wider world.

The everything is equally canon is also a stupid policy put in place after the old EU was abolished. It makes it hard for creative teams to create stories without being subjected to Lucasart approval.

The non-movies stuff under Kennedy's management is very poor imo. There is very little Star Wars novels, games and shows that could have expanded the universe a lot more.

Kennedy is a very good movie producer and is someone talented a running a movie studio. But Lucasfilm isn't just a typical movie studio. It was a creative empire that was able to produce entertainment in all sorts of different form. It was run by a person that took personal interest in the world-building aspect even in the non-movie materials. Her management style of Lucasfilm has shown her to be a person who consistently delegate tasks to people she thought is better than her in those task. This is an acceptable style of management in some companies, but it is not ideal when you are mananging a creative franchise like Star Wars or Marvel.

She's a good leader that's not a good match for running a company like Lucasfilm. She can keep the company profitable and minimise the risks, but she's not good at fully exploiting the potential of the Star Wars franchise.

bilateralrope wrote: ↑2019-01-24 10:46pmBy creative control, I'm thinking he's annoyed that Disney won't let him stick lootboxes in Star Wars games. EA can ignore Belgian law telling them that lootboxes are illegal, but they can't ignore the mouse.

That's probably a fair assumption. I think part of it is also that developing in-house IP means you can also keep all of the money the game makes, while using someone else's property usually means you have to share some of the money with the IP's owner depending on the details of the licensing contract.

Its been 20 years since the last X-wing title. Probably a very easy game to make given most of its environments are empty space. The SW flight sim games were always blockbusters, not sure why nobody has grabbed that free cash.

Patroklos wrote: ↑2019-01-25 11:01am Its been 20 years since the last X-wing title. Probably a very easy game to make given most of its environments are empty space. The SW flight sim games were always blockbusters, not sure why nobody has grabbed that free cash.

They aren't blockbusters by modern standards though.

And even when people have tried to make similar seeming games like Strike Suit Zero or House of the Dying Sun they've been niche as fuck.

There's no free cash there.

There's maybe a couple of nostalgia dollars, but those barely pay the bills (see: Obsidian Entertainment. Now acquired by Microsoft because farming nostalgia dollars doesn't make a sustainable business model*)

Also, LucasArts stopped in-house development years ago. By the time of the prequels in-house development was dead. LucasArts was a dead brand walking since even before the first KotOR. Anyone who blames Kennedy for shuttering the brand is a fuckwit.


* Kickstarter is bad at funding games because all the money you get from it is income for that tax year, so needs tax paying on it all in one go even if the thing it's funding takes 3 years to make. Money from a publisher comes in the form of an investment loan or amortised over development which isn't all tax in one year or is a tax writeoff so more of the funding goes directly to development

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-01-25 04:48amShe is also the one who make the statement about how great EA was as a company to produce Star Wars games. If she thinks EA is a company that is actually able to pump out a wide variety of video games, I doubt she has seriously done any serious research into EA as a company beyond looking at financial figures.

How bad did EA look as a choice back in 2013 when the deal was made ?

Were there any AAA publishers who looked better ?

Sure, I think that giving the exclusive license to any publisher would be a bad idea. But if Disney don't want to do any management of games themselves, you've either got to pick someone to do the management or accept that lots of crap will be using your license. Though if we look to Games Workshop as an example of giving the license to almost anyone, I will note that the crap 40K games don't seem to be hurting their reputation.

If anything I think the Games Workshop example is very telling. If something is crap then people will avoid it and in this day and age word of mouth can be very fast indeed.

The Star Wars EU of old had a fair few horrow show novels but by the time you realised you'd bought something barely worth toilet paper your money was already somewhat in LucasFilm hands. Nowadays it's far easier to sink a lot of money into something that suddenly doesn't pay back which from memory is why If it weren't for Dawn of War then Firewarrior would have probably killed off GW gaming for a time.

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-01-25 04:48amAnd I think you are being overly defensive of Kennedy all the time. It was under her leadership that shut down Lucasart. She effectively killed the studio even though a SW game was close to completion prior to the acquisition by Disney.

Like Vendetta said, LucasArts was practically a dead studio well before the EA license or Disney buyout. Let's look at their Star Wars games from 2009-2012:

Star Wars Battlefront: Mobile Squadrons (2009)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Republic Heroes (2009)
Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron (2009)
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (2010) - not sure why it's in the OP picture but whatever
Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011)
Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011)
Kinect Star Wars (2012)
Angry Birds Star Wars (2012)

Kinect Star Wars was a shitty tech demo, Angry Bird Star Wars barely counts and I'll just ignore the Battlefront mobile game because the OP picture also ignored EA's Star Wars mobile game. So five whole games in five years. TFU2 was a rushed, unfinished copy of TFU and TOR had all kinds of problems that are pretty well known. So uh, three games that are maybe worth anything?

EDIT: Lego games are generally fun, so I'll give it that. Never played Republic Heroes or Elite Squadron, but after a quick look the former was apparently garbage and the latter distinctly average for the portable platforms, so hardly a AAA title of any sort. I give LucasArts a 1/5, maybe 1.5/5 for good, non-mobile games in the final years of their life.

Technically a better output than EA but still, LucasArts was clearly on the decline and Kennedy doing what she did was putting it out of its misery. Not that EA as sole license was a good idea in the end, but she can hardly be blamed for the death of LucasArts. She just took the sick thing out behind the shed and shot it, but it was sick well before she was the one in charge.

RogueIce wrote: ↑2019-01-26 05:13pm Like Vendetta said, LucasArts was practically a dead studio well before the EA license or Disney buyout. Let's look at their Star Wars games from 2009-2012:

Star Wars Battlefront: Mobile Squadrons (2009)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Republic Heroes (2009)
Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron (2009)
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (2010) - not sure why it's in the OP picture but whatever
Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011)
Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011)
Kinect Star Wars (2012)
Angry Birds Star Wars (2012)

Kinect Star Wars was a shitty tech demo, Angry Bird Star Wars barely counts and I'll just ignore the Battlefront mobile game because the OP picture also ignored EA's Star Wars mobile game. So five whole games in five years. TFU2 was a rushed, unfinished copy of TFU and TOR had all kinds of problems that are pretty well known. So uh, three games that are maybe worth anything?

EDIT: Lego games are generally fun, so I'll give it that. Never played Republic Heroes or Elite Squadron, but after a quick look the former was apparently garbage and the latter distinctly average for the portable platforms, so hardly a AAA title of any sort. I give LucasArts a 1/5, maybe 1.5/5 for good, non-mobile games in the final years of their life.

Technically a better output than EA but still, LucasArts was clearly on the decline and Kennedy doing what she did was putting it out of its misery. Not that EA as sole license was a good idea in the end, but she can hardly be blamed for the death of LucasArts. She just took the sick thing out behind the shed and shot it, but it was sick well before she was the one in charge.

Lucasart was on the decline after the end of the prequels, but a revitalised Star Wars franchise would have been the perfect opportunity to re-establish Lucasart as a major studio. Lucasart as a publisher can also ensure direct creative control over the video games rather than relying on EA to liaises with Lucasfilm.

Even if Lucasart don't have a strong in-house development team, they could very well function as a publisher of Star Wars games. That was what they've done with many Star Wars games in the early 2000s. She's far too quick to wash her hands off things she doesn't quite understand ( namely video games and world-building). Together with the fact that she hired a director who is not exactly the best person to do world-building to kick-start a whole new era of Star Wars, I think Kennedy has severely under-exploited the potential of the Star Wars franchise.

bilateralrope wrote: ↑2019-01-25 11:00pm How bad did EA look as a choice back in 2013 when the deal was made ?

Were there any AAA publishers who looked better ?

Sure, I think that giving the exclusive license to any publisher would be a bad idea. But if Disney don't want to do any management of games themselves, you've either got to pick someone to do the management or accept that lots of crap will be using your license. Though if we look to Games Workshop as an example of giving the license to almost anyone, I will note that the crap 40K games don't seem to be hurting their reputation.

Outsourcing exclusive video games development to any publisher is always a bad idea. The problem is Lucasart could have functioned as a decent publisher of Star Wars games, and Kennedy should never shut it down under any circumstances. Moreover, anyone who is familiar with EA as a company will be aware of how controversial some of their business practices could be. They are very effective at making money off their games, but they do tend to do damage to a wide variety of Intellectual property under their management.

I do not feel Disney or Kennedy has done sufficient research about EA as a company prior to giving them the license. This seems like a case of them looking at the financial numbers and not bothering to look at the amount of IP EA has thrown into the bin.

RogueIce wrote: ↑2019-01-26 05:13pm
Like Vendetta said, LucasArts was practically a dead studio well before the EA license or Disney buyout. Let's look at their Star Wars games from 2009-2012:

LucasArts weren't even really a studio.

They were a publisher with hardly any actual internal development happening.

The last new full price internally developed game from LucasArts was Gladius in 2003, and they'd been tailing off since 1999 or so. After that there was one remaster and one platformer and everything else that came out under the brand from 2003 onwards was developed externally and published by LucasArts.

At the time of shuttering LucasArts hadn't had an internal development team for about a decade. They were a publisher, and as a publisher were a bit of a one trick pony, their only consistent successes being the Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones games.

Licensing the IP out to a much bigger and better resourced publisher was absolutely the sensible commercial decision. Keeping LucasArts around when they weren't even being good at publishing Star Wars games anyway*, rather than letting someone else assume all the commercial risks involved in development, would have been dumb.

* I refused to buy any LucasArts published games again after I found out how they fucked up KotOR2, after all.

I have about 1/3 of the titles from the first group, and 0 of the titles from the second. This is because I refuse to do business with EA, and even the carrot of Star Wars games for this Star Wars fanatic is not enough to overcome my extreme distaste for EA. I agree that a single publisher controlling the Star Wars IP is a bad idea in general, and a worse idea in particular if that publisher is EA.

I'm planning on buying a new computer soon, and was thinking of finally buying the Battlefront games at the same time.

I think I will pass, now, to demonstrate my displeasure with EA.

I purchased the X-wing series, Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series, the original Battlefront series, and Force Unleashed.

The rest, I tried them, and Palpatines Wrinkled Balls, they were crappy by comparison to the ones I owned.

Last Wars game I played was either Jedi Outcast or KotOR, depending on which came later, and I wasn't particularly enamoured with either of them.
I know being railroaded into becoming a Jedi was sort of built into their backstories but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
The last Wars game I remember seriously enjoying was 'Rebellion' (the X-Wing games were well done but require a skillset I apparently don't have)

When battlefront 2 was at the peak of the loot box controversy it was on the international news media..... that's special for a video game.

But a couple of big things are working together here.

For one thing reality is all the games EA cancelled were one's that didn't originally start as Star Wars game as far as I can tell, and that kind of development hell is a big problem. Because if you take too long developing a game it's going to be stagnant technologically by the time it comes out, and that makes it much harder to sell unless it's totally killer on store and gameplay. Not many games manage that. EA might be greedy, but it's also got the sense to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and abandon ship when needed. This is why EA isn't bankrupt and a million other companies went bankrupt and got bought out by EA. They wouldn't have killed these games if they were going somewhere good. Games are cancelled all the damn time in the industry. The biggest publishers just get more attention.

Isn't for nothing that while in ~2000 about 100 different AAA quality studios existed in the world now its more like 15. The money involved is just too vast now.

Lets be realistic here, Disney trying to make lots of Star Wars movies quickly has blown up in there face. The fiscal loss was limited, but nobody knows what it will mean long term (I think not much though, but profit won't grow either)

What's more EA got this license in the middle of it's great pivot towards making 100% of it's games on the Frostbite engine, and that pivot has been very troublesome for them. Frostbite isn't easy to use and originally was only setup for FPS games. Mass Effect was completely killed by the difficulty of this transition and it's still affecting other things. As a strategy this wasn't a bad move by EA, but it was never going to be easy.

Also, EA has to pay license fees on every game, not just for the rights to the IP in general, such fees usually involve a large minimal payment, and that makes it implausible that they will spam a really large numbers of games. Given the need to pay minimal fees, the bias for them is in favor of scarcity, total revenue per year is variable but in the end finite. Disney is fine with this because the whole reason Disney went this way was to offload risk, all risk is on EA.

That said the stock market is certainly abash with concerns that EA as a whole is loosing it's edge in development terms, but the reality is the only thing actually undercutting it really just seems to be mobile gaming in general, and whatever you can say about EA, the mobile market is so much damn worse on average. I imagine though the insane success of Apex Legends might be changing that tune. 10 million unique players in 72 hours, and it's crushing Fortnite on Twitch by 3:1 viewership numbers after Fortnite was the crown of Twitch for I dunno, two years?

The Romulan Republic wrote: ↑2019-01-28 04:40pm I'm planning on buying a new computer soon, and was thinking of finally buying the Battlefront games at the same time.

I think I will pass, now, to demonstrate my displeasure with EA.

You might want to try battlefront 2 while it still has a decent player base, I doubt anyone is left playing Battlefront 1. Flawed and screwed up as its loot box crap was, it looks amazing, like Star Wars for real if you can play in 4K, the droids are hilarious and frankly the way things are going we might not get another Star Wars game with this kind of graphical fidelity for a decade. While EA basically nerfed the live service post launch they did still make the Clone Wars heroes and Geonosis map everyone asked for, and sure didn't skimp on the original game. That might well never happen again, the Clone Wars are popular as an era with a certain kind of fan, but long term they aren't going to have the pull the original trilogy heroes have or ever increasing numbers of new Disney Era characters and settings.

Patroklos wrote: ↑2019-01-25 11:01am Its been 20 years since the last X-wing title. Probably a very easy game to make given most of its environments are empty space. The SW flight sim games were always blockbusters, not sure why nobody has grabbed that free cash.

Not really, even by completely different industry standards and development costs then existed then as now. When most of those X-wing games were made 10 million dollars was incredibly expensive for a video game and the flight sim game market was bigger in general. According to wikipedia the last X-wing game, Alliance, sold under 150,000 copies in the US alone. So probably not a vastly higher total in the world. That's a successful indie game today, but it means nothing to a company like EA and could only justify a very small developmental budget and something like generation before last graphics. But the X-wing games had very good graphics for their time.

That's why we used to get such vast ranges of niche games. They were very cheap to make, and buyers didn't expect better because hardware people owned couldn't display better. Today yeah sure you can still make cheap games, but the cost of creating graphically advanced content is very high.

Battlefront 2 actually has pure ship to ship combat in space though, as well as flying during the Galactic Assault mode that has ground fighting. Battlefront 1 didn't.