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In case you’ve been living under a rock (a common occurrence in the Dagobah System), The Walt Disney Company and EA have entered into a multi-year licensing agreement that allows the latter to publish Star Wars games. BioWare, DICE, and Visceral will be the EA studios handling the upcoming games. It’s been lots of fun reading and listening to reactions on the deal. Some of them are just…crazy. Some people are acting like Disney handed over the rights to Star Wars to a legion of baby seal killers that hunt whales and burn down rain forests on the side.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the harsh reactions of some gamers, a few journalists, and a couple of developers. EA has a bad reputation that has been exaggerated to the point of the company being selected as the worst in America by readers of The Consumerist. That distinction is preposterous; there are dozens (hundreds?) of companies in the banking, pharmaceutical, oil, and tobacco industries that are way worse for Americans. Perhaps I was being naive in thinking that all gamers should be happy that Star Wars will live on in the gaming universe. I’m just having a hard time understanding all the negativity.
I wonder what alternatives haters of this deal would have preferred. Not many publishers are in a position to pay “Disney money.” As far as American publishers go, Activision and Microsoft could afford it and after that…I can’t think of anyone else. While Star Wars has certainly become a global phenomenon, its identity is very much rooted in America. It would have been strange if Disney licensed the rights to a European or Japanese developer. Even thinking about a Star Wars game from Konami or Ubisoft feels weird.
Perhaps there wasn’t a perfect partner for Disney. No matter what, some gamers would have bitched and moaned about any publisher that paid for the rights to make Star Wars games. EA certainly has the money and talent to make some great ones. While there’s no guarantee that the company will produce top-quality games, at least the potential is there. Isn’t that better than not having any Star Wars games at all?
Anyway, what’s your take on the deal? How do you feel about EA making Star Wars games?
I think the bitching is well deserved with EA’s pedigree of exclusive license agreements. Of course this also means that PC versions of these games will have to go through Origin and never go on sale. The earnings call made mention of the VERY high margin digital sales.
Worst Company? That’s fine. A company who provides entertainment when its servers are up and is very consumer unfriendly should be admonished. Granted they aren’t on BP’s level of bad but then again EA literally goes out of their way to piss gamers off. BP was just lazy and the outcome was horrific. For what it’s worth I would have tried to add a nomination for Entergy for worst company. If you watched the Superbowl you can see why.
Hey, now! I’m a company in the oil industry and I voted for EA as the worst company in America because I sure as hell wasn’t going to vote for my company (or industry).
Personally, I would have preferred Bungie to get the license (or one of the licenses). But see, that’s the thing; Disney should not have given exclusivity to any one company. For starters, only one company could afford it, and that is akin to putting all of your eggs in a DRM-covered basket. Second, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but EA is the worst company in America (yuk, yuk).
What Disney should have done is one of two things: 1) Create their own in-house development studio comprised of some of the best people in the business. Disney has the resources to have not only their own development studio, but their own publishing studio as well. With the rights to Marvel, Mickey, Star Wars and a whole bunch of other stuff, they already have all of the existing creative IPs they will ever need. Plus, they have TV and movie studios and distribution channels already, so a gaming channel would be a natural fit for their business.
2) Break up the existing Star Wars IPs and auction them off to the highest bidder for a 10-year term each. This way, you give a chance for many studios or publishers to get their hands on at least SOME type of Star Wars license. The 10-year term would prevent companies from “sitting” on the licences and not doing anything with them, it would also give the licencee enough time to make a game or three and realize the profit (or loss) from it. This would also benefit gamers since we would have a wide variety of Star Wars-themed games from many different developers. I’m sure some of them are bound to be good (and not have to be constantly connected to the internet).
So, in short, please hire me, Disney. I’ll work for peanuts and I already live in Florida (assuming your gaming department is run out of Orlando). I can promise you that I will make you bigger than EA and Activision, plus, I guarantee that you won’t be hated anywhere near as much as those guys are.
-M
After its experiences with Epic Mickey, Disney doesn’t appear to be interested in big-budget console and PC games. The company seems far more interested in mobile and social gaming, which is completely understandable.
Why would they license it out in a competitive manner? This way they have one publisher that not only runs high margins but has excellent experience in exclusive licensing. Disney wants Madden money for the license. This way there is no comparison. You want Star Wars well here you go.
I really hate our tremendously high barriers to entry in this country these last few years.
Why wouldn’t they license it out in a competitive manner? The way I see it, Disney is putting all of their eggs in the very smelly EA basket. By piecemeal-ing out the various Star Wars franchises, you have a huge opportunity to make more per each licensed product than you would with just the one “Star Wars” all-encompassing brand. It also gives an opportunity to smaller developers to get some small part of the franchise and, who knows? Maybe they make something great out of a relatively obscure part of the greater SW franchise that the bigger guys passed up because they did not see the potential. Yeah, it may be a little more work on their part to auction off a bunch of different rights, but at the end of the day, I guarantee you that they will make more money by using this method.
-M
The NFL has an exclusive license with EA. They have been using the same engine with minor tweaks for the whole console generation. If you want the popular and well selling NFL brand then you have to buy from EA. The quality of the game isn’t where it should be but that doesn’t matter since a competitor can’t use the license to make a better title like NFL2k5. It’s really bad when an NFL2k5 retails for $20 brand new and offers a better product and thus lowering the margins. Price in addition to quality of content are part of the competition rubric and will theoretically bring less money to the NFL.
The other train of thought is that if the license is held at one publisher (and this is the lesser of the 2 reasons) is that they can control the quality of the popular NFL license.
I agree with you that competition is good for the consumer but with the money that EA has and the speed with which they can churn titles due to licensed engines, a smaller developer stood no chance. Furthermore a smaller developer couldn’t afford a license since EA would have inflated the bid so much creating an absurdly high barrier to entry.
Replace NFL with StarWars in that hypothet.
Your analogy doesn’t work because the NFL and Star Wars differ in the sense that the NFL is a real-life company whereas Star Wars is a completely fictional universe.
If I use your analogy, that would mean that different developers would be able to bid on different licenses for each NFL team. Which means that Bungie could have the rights to The Saints and make a first-person shooter around Drew Brees while the Dolphins licence can go to Bioware to make an RPG that will be shit (because it’s the Dolphins, after all). It doesn’t work with the NFL because all of those teams have to interact with each other during the course of the game. Your argument has to do with one single license going out to one single company versus one single license going out to several companies.
What I am talking about is several Star Wars licenses going out to several companies. For example, the Tie Fighter franchise can go to Valve, the Battlefront franchise can go to Remedy, the KOTOR franchise can go to BioWare, the Pod Racing franchise can go to Rockstar, etc.
Instead of handing out the keys to the building to EA, what I am saying is that Disney should have rented the individual units out to different publishers much like a landlord rents out apartments. EA probably has no interest in developing some of the franchises that come with the Star Wars license, so the logical thing to do would be to break up each facet of what Lucas Arts used to own and have the highest bidder pay for only what they are interested in and give the other, smaller guys a chance to bid on something at least related to Star Wars.
Double Fine is not a wealthy developer, but imagine if they had the rights to Star Wars 1313 that they got for cheap because no other “big” developer/publisher thought it wasn’t big enough to purchase.
This is the kind of logical and mutually beneficial business plan that moves the industry forward in the right direction because in the scenario I describe, EVERYBODY wins (including EA and Disney).
-M
Wait so the different NFL teams are significant to your counter but you are parsing out the different pieces of the star wars universe? Star Wars is Star Wars and the NFL is the NFL. Happens to be 32 teams that make up the shield but the analogy is sound I believe.
I think you are underestimating the tenacity of legal maneuvers these studios would pull over infringement. Valve would inevitably be sued by BIoware for including a Star Destroyer in the Tie Fighter game (which i’d love to have btw for Oculus Rift) because Bioware believes that Star Destroyers are part of the license it purchased for their portion of the Star Wars Universe. You can’t parse it out like that.
Disney is interested in making money of course and they see that EA has the deepest pocketbooks to purchase a wildly popular license. They give zero fucks about DoubleFine offering up 200k for a license compared to 50, 60, 100 million for however long the term is for.
I do understand them wanting to keep the license in one place to maintain quality control (haha) but it doesn’t benefit you or I.
I never once denied your consumer friendly and fan friendly method. I’d welcome it, but licensing costs are an absurd barrier to entry. I’d also pay $100 for a new Tie Fighter game that uses the Oculus Rift.
In some of those examples, you’re awarding licenses to developers, not publishers. I can’t imagine a company handing over rights and permissions to a developer. The publisher is the one that has to market and sell the game.
I understand your general argument, but multiple licenses seems like a mess waiting to happen. If Disney wants to make its own Star Wars games in the future, it would also complicate things. Look at the mess Disney has with the multiple Marvel licenses floating around. For commercial purposes, I’m sure that Marvel would love to have Spider-Man and Wolverine in The Avengers, but they can’t because of old deals.
It’s like this to me. Both Lucas and EA have a history of running franchises into the dirt. That would be my only thought if Lucas didn’t recently sell SW to Disney. I’m now reserving judgement until at least two games hit.