During a presentation at the 2020 DICE Summit on Wednesday, Sean Shoptaw, Senior Vice President of Games and Interactive Experiences for The Walt Disney Company, shared his perspective on trends in the video game industry that are changing the gaming landscape. One of those trends he’d like to see continue is the creation of more games like 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Shoptaw, who has been with Disney since 2011, encouraged developers and creatives to “come and play” with Disney’s extensive catalog of characters and franchises to help usher in the next generation of original interactive storytelling. He cited Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man and Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order as prime examples of how Disney characters and settings could be successfully reimagined.
The Disney exec also spoke about the importance of challenging assumptions and pushing boundaries in order to continue to evolve as an industry. This is particularly telling, considering Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a single-player, narrative-driven game published by Electronic Arts, a company whose Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen notoriously claimed in 2017 that players don’t like linear single-player experiences as much as they did five or 10 years ago.
This assumption proved to be untrue, given the unprecedented success of many recent single-player games such as God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and of course Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which became the sixth bestselling title of 2019 in the US, even though it wasn’t released until November of that year.
The success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is especially notable, considering that the project didn’t even start out as a Star Wars game. Respawn Entertainment was working on a third-person action game when the company was acquired by Electronic Arts, who had just secured the rights to the Star Wars license from Disney. The game Respawn was developing quickly transformed into a Star Wars title whose story has now become part of the official canon.
Creating more Disney games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which not only experienced great success in the gaming world but also had an impact on other industries, is a challenge that hopefully more developers are willing to take on. Disney has a number of ongoing successful game franchises, including Star Wars Battlefront and Kingdom Hearts. But having acquired a large portion of 21st Century Fox in early 2019, Disney now theoretically has access to that company’s franchises as well, opening up the possibility of games based on X-Men, Avatar, Indiana Jones, and the Alien series.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was released in November 2019 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter