During a
Reddit AMA that was done back in January this year by developer
Petroglyph Games, the latter seemingly expressed interest on the part of their company to develop real-time strategy (RTS) games set in the Star Wars universe (again).
As a large number of readers would remember,
Petroglyph were the folks behind the
Empire At War Star Wars RTS game as well as its expansion,
Forces of Corruption. It was heartening to see that since the time
Electronic Arts won the exclusive rights to make
Star Wars AAA games from
Disney,
Petroglyph had actually reached out to the former to suggest collaboration in the development of a RTS game in the SW universe.
Unfortunately,
Petroglyph seems to have encountered resistance or reluctance on the part of
EA, as stated by
Petroglyph developer
Ted-PG in the AMA:
This is something that is purely corporate. I don't have details, but
EA has the license to do all
Star Wars games and they seem focused on making a few titles at a very high quality bar. So, they are using all their available resources to that end, which means that if you're not into FPS, it's not currently a priority.
We have reached out to them a few times to see if they would be interested in contracting us to build an Empire at War II at the same quality level as their other Star Wars FPS titles, but nothing has resulted from that (yet).
Source: Petroglyph
Though there are numerous possible reasons why
EA would not want to collaborate or outsource a
Star Wars RTS game, the greatest of which no doubt has to be that they still have experienced RTS hands still scattered throughout their development studio. Nonetheless, it is to the larger loss of us as the fans of both the RTS genre as well as of the
Star Wars franchise that such a game still has not been developed yet since
EA won the rights to make games based on the IP a couple of years back.
Here's hoping
Petroglyph finds success in their efforts to collaborate with
EA on the
Star Wars IP in the future and that
EA does not take any longer to resume the development of RTS games, no matter what franchise or IP the games would be set in.
