It Doesn’t Have to Always Be Triple-A”: Galactic Racer and Zero Company’s Success Has Lucasfilm Wanting Altro Smaller-Scale Star Wars Giochi

Studios far, far away from expectations

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has been everywhere recently, seemingly thanks both to its genuine quality as a game and to the wave of people falling for little mole guy Biddy Blas. The success of Fuse Giochi’ Galactic Racer follows the similarly warm reception of Bit Reactor’s XCOM-flavoured Star Wars Zero Company (though that success did not stop staff furloughs, which are at least beginning to be reversed in some cases), making clear there is a market for Star Wars games beyond blockbusters like the Battlefront series. Douglas Reilly, vice president of Lucasfilm Giochi, seems to agree, telling 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 carry the weight of what the Star Wars series has been in games for many years. Disney’s deal granting EA priority-publisher status produced DICE’s Battlefront revival and Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi series, but it also kept the franchise largely on guaranteed money-making concepts such as the live-service shooter or the third-person singleplayer action game. Star Wars Outlaws stepped outside that mould, though Ubisoft’s attempt never quite became the shining star it had hoped for.

Image credit: Bit Reactor

Zero Company and Galactic Racer, by contrast, are a strategy/tactics and a racing game respectively—neither necessarily harder to sell, but certainly a little more niche. Even so, both were backed (with another asterisk attached to Bit Reactor here) by Lucasfilm Giochi and ended up among the best-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,” a description that fits both studios’ attempts well.

It is worth noting that Bit Reactor is made up of ex-XCOM staff, and Fuse Giochi was originally founded by Criterion staff who had prior Lucasfilm experience from working on the modern Battlefront series. That lends weight to Reilly’s remark 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 am 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 following 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 is 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, considering how EA’s future is looking under Saudi ownership, it is probably for the best that the Star Wars series is no longer tied to that ship.