Community manager for Star Wars: Battleftont 2 Mat Everett recently gave an official explanation why all of EA game developers cannot talk about future details and long term plans freely. The reason is not in Disney alone, as many of us thought.
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It’s a well-known fact that updates about EA’s games don’t come often, don’t cover long periods of time into the future and are often only talking about things that will be released very soon. I admit, until recently I thought it’s purely because of Disney when it comes to the Star Wars license. It’s true that Disney likes to hold a tight leash on all of their products and every single decision for the Star Wars video games has to go first through them first for approval before it is disclosed to the public. This makes communication with the fans even slower and harder. EA has many other video games under its hood and not all of them struggle from such lack of proper communication and free speech between fans and developers.
It’s not all Disney’s fault.
In a response to a desperate fan asking for information about the next update to DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront 2, community manager Mat Everett said: “Because of being a publicly traded company, EA only reveals specific details on what is coming within that quarter”. He also added that “our progression update is coming and we have a massive amount of detail coming for that”. This is, for now, the latest communication form the team regarding what can we expect in the upcoming update to Star Wars: Battlefront 2.
In case you didn’t know, a public company, publicly traded company, publicly held company, publicly listed company, or public corporation is a corporation whose ownership is dispersed among the general public in many shares of stock which are freely traded on a stock exchange or in over the counter markets.
Because EA owns Bioware, the same rule probably applies to the dev team at Bioware Austin, responsible for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Update: When I spoke to community manager Eric Musco and creative director Charles Boyd about Updates 5.9 and 5.19, I also asked that very same question to see their response. To my surprise, the answer was quite different and more in line with what we have been hearing from Bioware Austin over the years. Edited quote from the interview:
One of the main reasons that we don’t talk specific for future updates is because stuff changes. In some cases it’s because of what is happening on the production side – getting things done and testing them and seeing if they would work. Other times we look at player feedback – things that they want to see. For us not talking specifics too far out gives us flexibility to be able to change things.
Also a big reason is because it may create a lot of friction. When we say this thing is coming in four months and will contain this and that, but then it doesn’t come out in four months and we’ve changed it or it doesn’t happen at all. When you are that far out.
You can watch the full interview here: SWTOR 5.9 and 5.10 Overview with Charles Boyd and Eric Musco. The question, which answer I quoted in the previous paragraph, was literally the first one after the introductoins.
We recently got the Winter and Spring 2018 Roadmap in which game producer Keith Kanneg only revealed details about the next two game updates – 5.8 and 5.9 coming in March and May of 2018. When Keith didn’t share anything about the studio’s plans for 6.0, the community’s reaction was very much split between “Ok, it’s coming, that’s enough for me” and “Damn, not a word about an expansion, we are doomed”. Now that it has been officially explained and confirmed, it might be wise to take a step down and calm ourselves. Whatever is coming or now, the dev team is not allowed to tell us for legal reasons that have nothing to do with content planning or game events schedules.
That sux! Right? Well, nothing we can do, or… can we?
So, to summarize all of this – even if DICE and Bioware are planning content for their games for the End of 2018 and even beyond into 2019, they are not allowed to tell us anything about it. I’ve got a favorite phrase that I like to use often during live streams and especially when my videos get claimed and blocked for “licensed” Star Wars OST in them (the InGame background music) – “Thank you, Disney!”. It seems now I may have to add “Thank you, EA stock holders!” :)))
