On This Day: EA’s Star Wars Deal Changed a Decade of Games

On May 6, 2013, Star Wars gaming changed overnight.

Disney and Lucasfilm announced a major multi-year agreement with Electronic Arts, giving EA the keys to Star Wars games for the “core gaming audience.” At the time, the official Lucasfilm announcement framed it as an exciting new phase, with DICE, Visceral Games, and BioWare all attached to future Star Wars projects.

In hindsight, it was not just a licensing deal. It was the beginning of an era — messy, controversial, occasionally brilliant, and impossible to ignore.

The Deal That Replaced LucasArts

The timing mattered. Disney had acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, and LucasArts’ days as a major internal game studio were effectively over. As WIRED reported at the time, EA would become the exclusive provider of Star Wars games for the core gaming market, while Disney kept certain rights for mobile, social, tablet, and online categories.

That distinction would shape everything that followed.

Instead of LucasArts building Star Wars games internally, the galaxy moved into a licensing era. EA had the big console and PC lane. BioWare already had Star Wars: The Old Republic. DICE would go on to rebuild Battlefront. Visceral was expected to bring something cinematic and story-driven to the table.

And then, because this is Star Wars gaming history, everything became complicated.

The EA Era Gave Us Hits, Scars, and Cal Kestis

The EA-exclusive era did produce major games.

Star Wars Battlefront arrived in 2015 with spectacular visuals and a very loud argument about content depth. Battlefront II followed in 2017 and became one of the most infamous launch controversies of the modern loot box era — before eventually evolving into a much better multiplayer Star Wars game.

Then came the twist: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Respawn’s 2019 single-player action adventure proved there was still a huge audience for premium, story-driven Star Wars games without multiplayer baggage or monetization smoke pouring out of the vents. Jedi: Survivor later strengthened that lane, turning Cal Kestis into one of the few modern Star Wars game protagonists who actually feels like he belongs in the larger canon conversation.

That is the strange thing about the EA deal. It both frustrated players and delivered some of the most important modern Star Wars games. Our Complete List of All Star Wars Games Ever Made puts that period in perspective: after the chaotic final LucasArts years, EA’s run became the defining AAA Star Wars gaming era of the 2010s.

The Games We Never Got Still Haunt the Deal

You cannot talk about EA’s Star Wars decade without talking about the ghosts.

Visceral’s Project Ragtag, led by Amy Hennig, became the great “what if” of the era: a cinematic, narrative-focused Star Wars game that never made it to release. EA Vancouver’s later open-world project also disappeared. For many players, those cancellations became the symbol of the deal’s biggest weakness: one publisher controlled too much of the premium Star Wars pipeline.

That did not mean every EA Star Wars game was bad. Far from it. But it did mean the franchise often felt narrower than it should have.

Star Wars gaming had once meant space sims, RTS games, shooters, RPGs, arcade oddities, MMOs, handheld experiments, and weird licensed chaos. Under EA, the output became more polished — but also slower and more concentrated.

That is exactly why our Star Wars Games 2012–2018 EA Exclusive Era hub feels like such a strange chapter. It has huge titles, cancelled dreams, mobile growth, modding explosions, and one very obvious question: what would this decade have looked like with more studios involved?

Battlefront Became the Symbol

No series represents the EA era better than Battlefront.

DICE’s reboot gave players some of the best-looking Star Wars battles ever put on screen. It also reminded everyone that beautiful lasers are not enough if players feel the structure around them is thin, restrictive, or monetized into oblivion.

And yet, Battlefront II refused to die quietly. Years after official content ended, the community is still pushing the game forward. We recently covered how Star Wars Battlefront II just got new KYBER and Battlefront Plus content in 2026, which is honestly the most Battlefront thing possible: EA moved on, but the players kept the war going.

That lingering passion says a lot. The EA deal may be over as the defining structure of Star Wars gaming, but its biggest games are still shaping what players want next.

Lucasfilm Games Opened the Doors Again

By 2021, the mood had changed.

Lucasfilm Games returned as the official identity for Lucasfilm’s gaming projects, and the company began talking openly about a broader future. In a StarWars.com interview about the new Lucasfilm Games era, Lucasfilm Games VP Douglas Reilly described the moment as the gaming galaxy’s “Big Bang.”

The clearest sign came when Ubisoft and Lucasfilm Games announced a new story-driven open-world Star Wars project led by Massive Entertainment — the game that eventually became Star Wars Outlaws.

Suddenly, EA was no longer the only major lane.

Now the picture looks very different. Ubisoft has entered the galaxy. Respawn remains important. Bit Reactor is working on strategy. Arcanaut Studios is building Fate of the Old Republic, and that project is already drawing attention because of its strong BioWare DNA — something we explored in our article on Fate of the Old Republic’s BioWare veteran team.

That is the modern multi-studio world covered in our Star Wars Games 2019–Present hub. More publishers. More genres. More chances for the galaxy to be weird again.

The Deal Was Not Simple — And That Is the Point

Looking back now, the EA agreement is easy to flatten into a meme.

Loot boxes bad. Cal good. Visceral cancelled. Battlefront chaos. Respawn saves the day.

But the truth is messier, and more interesting.

The May 6, 2013 deal brought stability at a moment when LucasArts had collapsed as an internal powerhouse. It gave Star Wars access to major AAA studios and huge production budgets. It also narrowed the field, slowed the release rhythm, and left players wondering how many great Star Wars games never happened because the license was too concentrated.

Thirteen years later, the lesson feels pretty clear: Star Wars gaming works best when no single model owns the whole galaxy.

EA gave us some important games. The wider Lucasfilm Games era may give us something better: variety.

And in Star Wars, variety matters. Some players want Jedi action. Some want smugglers. Some want strategy. Some want MMOs. Some want Battlefront back so badly they are basically lighting signal fires on the hill.

On this day in 2013, EA’s Star Wars deal changed the next decade of games.

The galaxy is still dealing with the consequences — and finally, maybe, enjoying the freedom after it.