I think it’s time to dust off your “Evil Empire” jokes, because EA executives delivered an uncanny impression of Emperor Palpatine during their quarterly financial report yesterday. According to CFO Blake Jorgensen, the megapublisher has mapped out their plan for global domination of the video game industry with a massive slate of upcoming titles that’ll take us all the way into 2020.
First, Jorgensen confirmed that Star Wars: Battlefront will be released in 2017, complete with maps based on the new series of films: “Next year we will see Star Wars: Battlefront back with bigger and better worlds, because we now have the new movies to work off of, not just the historical movies that we used before.” He added that EA will also release at least one Star Wars game per year until 2019 or 2020. That includes Visceral’s Star Wars game, which will be released in 2018, and Repawn’s recently announced game, which has no release date but should probably be penciled in for 2019.
The executive then pivoted away from Star Wars to reveal that an internal EA studio is working on an original property for 2017, and the publisher has started development on multiple action games that’ll be released 2018 and 2020:
“We do have a new IP coming next year. We haven’t yet announced it, but it’s something that you’ll see probably coming up soon.”
“We’re making broad investments that fuel the growth of the company well beyond [2017 and 2018]. Really today we’re building an action genre product that’s probably [due in 2019 or 2020]. Most of what we’re investing in that’s incremental now probably comes in [2018 or 2019]. But clearly, some of our investment is to grow out our product base for what we’re going on as well.”
It might be a while before we learn more about some of the more distant games, but there’s a good chance we could hear something about the upcoming original title at this year’s E3 Expo.
