EA has revealed that the multi-year deal with Disney to develop Star Wars games lasts a decade; the company has revealed.
Chief financial officer at EA, Blake Jorgensen, revealed the length of the deal at a UBS Conference and his comments were transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
"We've done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing a movie game – i.e. a game based on the movie.
"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.
"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.
"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 movie."
He added that Star Wars: Battlefront, which was announced at E3 this year and is expected to launch in summer 2015, has "a lot of people very excited."
Jorgensen also spoke about BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic which is believed to have cost $200 million to develop excluding marketing and which went free-to-play after less than a year as a subscription MMO.
"Yes the original expectations obviously were very, very large and obviously the multiplayer MMO world has – the popularly has come down over time and we tried to restructure the Star Wars business to better match the economics.
"It's a great business that's very repeatable. We brought the economics in line so it's a profitable business for us.
"…And as the Star Wars franchises start to grow with Disney's investment, we'll continue to see more excitement around that game as well as the other games that we'll start to produce."
EA has previously described Battlefront and developer DICE as a "match made in heaven". The deal with Disney will also see Star Wars games from Visceral and BioWare.
