Star Wars fans have finally gotten to enjoy some variety once more in how the sci-fi setting has been showcased in games thanks to releases like Star Wars Zero Company and Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Lucasfilm has taken note of this and said that it will continue to work on more surprises with the Star Wars franchise. In an interview with The Game Business, Lucasfilm Games executive Douglas Reilly spoke about being generally less restrictive with Star Wars going forward.
According to Reilly, the company is trying to be “more flexible about, like, who we’re willing to take pitches from and good ideas can come from a lot of different places.” Noting that the Star Wars license has largely been stuck with a single major publisher for the last several years, Reilly went on to say that “You don’t have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a Star Wars game. We have a high-quality bar, and we want to make sure they’re excellent experiences, and that means typically you work with more experienced teams than, you know, new teams who have no track record of making great things.”
While Reilly didn’t go into too many details about what we can expect from the Star Wars IP in the future, he said that the company is “exploring all kinds of things [with] large and small partners that I think are going to continue to surprise folks who are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a thing with them. That might be interesting to see how that turns out.”
Prior to Disney infamously having signed a 10-year deal with EA in 2013 that gave the publisher the exclusive rights to develop and publish Star Wars games, we used to see quite a bit of genre variety. The 1990s and 2000s were marked by several Star Wars games like X-Wing, Rebel Assault, Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron, Empire at War, and Episode 1 Racer. Through these releases, we got to see the Star Wars setting from just about every genre out there, from real-time strategy in Empire at War to space-based dogfighting in X-Wing, and even narrative shooters in Jedi Knight.
Following the deal, however, we only saw a pair of Battlefront games, Respawn’s Star Wars: Jedi series, and LEGO Star Wars, with experimental titles becoming rare aside from a handful of VR experiences and 2020’s Star Wars: Squadrons.
2026 has marked a return to form for the franchise, however, with both Zero Company and Galactic Racer managing to garner critical praise and commercial success. Both titles are available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, take a look at our reviews. We gave Zero Company a score of 9 out of 10 thanks to its strong writing and fun tactical gameplay loop. As for Galactic Racer, we also gave it a score of 9 out of 10 thanks to tight core racing mechanics with satisfying takedowns and rewarding progression mechanics.
Star Wars Zero Company has even gone on to sell more than a million copies, and developer Bit Reactor has said that it is working on more updates for the game.
