Disney Will No Longer Self-Publish Its Video Games

Ask pretty much any fan of Star Wars video games and they’ll be more than happy to talk about how bad the current state of affairs is. That may change soon though along with all future games with Disney content. In a recent quarterly earnings call, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, said that they’re no longer going to self-publish games. This means that other companies like EA will have to publish the Star Wars games they make. Disney will still be in charge of licensing though.

“We’re obviously mindful of the size of that business but over the years we’ve tried our hand at self-publishing … and we’ve found that we haven’t been particularly good at the self-publishing side.

We’ve just decided that the best place for us to be in that space is licensing and not publishing. We have good relationships with some of those that we’re licensing to, notably EA.”

I hope this means that Disney is greatly considering teaming up with other studios after the exclusive deal with EA runs out in 2023. After all, in about 6 years, EA has only released two games. Battlefront did well, but I didn’t care for it as it felt like a Star Wars skin was slapped on Call of Duty and of course there was the lack of a story mode. Battlefront II made definite improvements in my opinion, but it struggled with sales with the micro-transaction controversy that quickly arose. It now struggles with a problem where some users who bought a physical copy can’t play the game anymore.

Maybe by forcing other companies to publish games we’ll see an improvement in quality and/or more realistic expectations. Do you think it’s a good idea for Disney to stop self-publishing?

Via: THR