Should EA Lose their Star Wars License

Why Does EA Keep Canceling Star Wars Games?

If you’ve been around our site for a while, you’ll know that we’ve written about quite a few anticipated Star Wars video games that were later canceled. Some were put to rest before they ever had the chance to be developed and others had us ready to purchase when they pulled the plug.

One thing they all had in common: they left us disappointed.

So, why does EA keep canceling Star Wars games?

Well, it would seem they have different reasons for doing so. Since EA secured the publishing rights on Star Wars games from Disney, they have canceled at least three Star Wars games. The most recent one being the Battlefront spin-off.

EA has given various reasons each time they cancel one of these anticipated games but the common thread seems to be timing.

The latest Star Wars game, code-named “Viking” was rumored to be a Battlefront spin-off with open-world elements. Allegedly there were too many people contributing ideas and not enough focus, which led to the game stalling out. EA hoped to release Viking around the time of the PS5 and Xbox Series X launch and when that wasn’t possible, they scrapped it.

Funny enough, the entire reason the Viking project started was because of a similar issue prior to that code-named “Orca”. This was going to follow a smuggle stye character and would have open-world planets in the Star Wars universe. However, EA saw its release schedule and concluded it needed something sooner so it was also canceled.

Before that we had Visceral’s Ragtag, which seemed to be the most promising. It was a single-player, linear adventure game. It was much like Uncharted, in a Star Wars theme. Unfortunately, it was canceled in favor of Orca.

All of this begs a really big question though – why can’t they get their timing right? With so much riding on it, so many fans looking forward to a new Star Wars game, and all the best experts in the field working on these projects, why can’t they seem to get it together in the right timeframe to actually see these projects to completion?

Lisa Clark

Lisa has been an avid gamer since she was old enough to hold her first controller and a game writer for more than a decade. A child of the Nintendo generation, she believes they just don’t make games like they used to but sometimes, they make them even better! While consoles will always be her first love, Lisa spends most of her gaming time on the PC these days- on MMOs and first-person shooters in particular.