"It doesn’t have to always be triple-A": Galactic Racer and Zero Company’s success has Lucasfilms wanting more smaller-scale Star Wars games

Studios far, far away from expectations

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has been fucking everywhere recently, seemingly both due to its actual quality as a game and also due to vast swathes of people falling in love with little mole guy Biddy Blas. The success of Fuse Games' Galactic Racer follows on from the similarly warm reception of Bit Reactor's XCOM-esque Star Wars Zero Company (though that success didn't prevent staff furloughs, which are at least starting to be undone in some cases), making it clear that there is a market for Star Wars games outside of just the blockbusters like the Battlefront series. The vice president of Lucasfilm Games, Douglas Reilly, seems to agree, stating in an interview with The Game Business that "Good ideas can come from a lot of different places. You don't have to necessarily be a Top Five publisher to make a great Star Wars game."

Reilly's words do come loaded with the context of what the Star Wars series has been in the games space for many years. Disney's deal with EA, for it to be the priority publisher for Star Wars games, produced DICE's Battlefront revival and the Star Wars Jedi series from Respawn, but did result in the Star Wars franchise being kept primarily to guaranteed moneymaker concepts, like the live service shooter or the third-person singleplayer action game. Star Wars Outlaws was a step outside of this, but Ubisoft's attempt didn't quite manage to be the shining star it had hoped for.

Zero Company and Galactic Racer, in contrast, are strategy/tactics and racing games respectively, which while not necessarily harder to sell, are definitely a little more niche. Despite this, they were supported (again, asterisk attached to Bit Reactor there) by Lucasfilm Games and ended up as some of the most well-received Star Wars games in recent memory. Reilly notes that "The goal has been to find the best partner who makes that experience come alive inside the galaxy far, far away", which does describe both studios' attempts pretty well.

It's worth noting that Bit Reactor is made up of ex-XCOM staff, and Fuse Games was originally founded by Criterion staff who'd had previous experience with Lucasfilm from working on the original Battlefront series. Which adds some weight to Reilly's comment that "We have a high quality bar, and that means typically we work with more experienced teams than ones with no track record. But we’re exploring all kinds of things, large and small, with partners that are going to surprise folks."

I'm not a Star Wars girl myself, but in the general interest of less safe art, I hope this leads to some real weird swings, like a management sim making the clones on Kamino, or a dating sim featuring only the non-humanoid aliens (give us freaks something, please). In the non-hypothetical future, there's still Fate of the Old Republic to come, alongside another Jedi game from Respawn and, at some point before the sun explodes, the 'paused' Knights of the Old Republic remake. And, well, considering how EA's future is looking under Saudi ownership, it's probably for the best that the Star Wars series isn't tied to that ship any longer.