On February 23, the world most famous virtual gaming platform Kotaku reported that Electronic Arts gaming company had canceled the development of its Star Wars game. It was engaged in EA Vancouver. This was posted on Twitter by Jason Schreyer, an editor-in-chief of the portal, one of the main insiders in the field. The Vancouver branch of EA was developing the single-player open-world video game Orca. It was based on a failed project of Visceral Games studio under the working title “Ragtag”. In 2017, Visceral Games was closed for unknown reasons. In the same year, according to information received from Schreyer, Orca was also shut down. After that, EA Vancouver took up another Star Wars game, Viking, but it was also canceled.
There is some good news. Schreyer said that Respawn Entertainment’s development studio has received permission to produce the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order sequel. It was released on November 15, 2019. Its average rating on the Metacritic aggregator is 8.1 out of 10, the result is well above the average. Financially, the novelty also became successful: by the end of January 2020, more than 8 million copies of the game were sold, what is 2 times higher than expectations of EA CFOs.
But the success of Respawn Entertainment is rather a pleasant exception to the currently generally negative video game situation in the George Lucas universe. In 2013, EA entered into a ten-year agreement for the exclusive Star Wars games publisher with its owner, Disney Corporation. Since that time, there have been as many canceled games as there are three released. And if the “Fallen Order” really gained popularity, then both parts of the multiplayer “Star Wars: Battlefront” were adopted very ambiguously. This is especially true considering the second one, which was released in 2017. The problem was not the gameplay but the greed of Electronic Arts. All progress was built on lootboxes – virtual cases, after “opening” them the player received items of random quantity and quality. These cases could be bought either for game currency or for real money, but if you did not want to pay from your pocket, the player had to earn this currency for many hours. Simply put, gamers were outraged by such a “segregation of rich and poor.” In addition, there was a problem in the element of randomness: an unnecessary thing could fall out of the lootbox, or it could be the most unique one, which gives a great advantage over other players.
As a result, EA gained a bad reputation in the gaming community. Players do not like the company because of excessive greed, and developers do not like it because of the production hell that many of its projects has fallen into. Visceral Games is one of the three examples when a large studio under the supervision of EA was closed. In addition, BioWare Montreal and Headgate Studios were also affected by the corporation.
