Disney Was Cautious About Letting Ubisoft Make A Star Wars Mmo But An Avatar Meeting Convinced It

Ubisoft is working on a Star Wars MMO, in case you hadn’t heard. It was announced earlier this year along with news that Disney was revoking EA’s exclusive license deal to create Star Wars video games, and Ubisoft Massive had been tapped to take Star Wars into the future with an all-new open-world game.

But Disney didn’t immediately turn to Ubisoft when it came time to give someone else the Star Wars license. In a new interview with IGN, Disney Games senior vice president Sean Shoptaw said that the company was wary of handing over such a lucrative license to just anyone, and it took them some convincing to go with Ubisoft Massive.

“We really wanted [the Star Wars game] to come at the right time with the right partner," Shoptaw said. “The worst thing we could do is do it wrong, and do it our way that doesn’t resonate with fans or doesn’t meet that bar.”

Disney wasn’t even initially thinking about Ubisoft for the next Star Wars game. Shoptaw recounts how he was initially meeting with Ubisoft Massive to talk about the upcoming Avatar game, but during that meeting, he was convinced by Massive’s passion for the franchise.

“That first meeting we had with Massive around the Avatar game after we acquired Fox was really the jumping-off point for the Star Wars game. There was such alignment and such creative passion around the Star Wars IP from that team that it just was a natural evolution to the relationship, and really led to the Star Wars game we announced not too long ago.”

We don’t know much about the still-untitled Star Wars game, but rumors are that it’ll be an open-world MMO game of some kind. Fans have long been asking for such an open-world Star Wars game (other than Star Wars: The Old Republic, apparently), and Massive’s upcoming game could be just what the fans want.

But that Star Wars game won’t come until after Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which was just officially announced at Ubisoft Forward last Saturday. That game is due out in 2022 and might feature some of the same gameplay elements that will find their way into the upcoming Star Wars MMO.