Disney’s head of gaming has (sort of) discussed the failure of so many Marvel games and why the new Indiana Jones game is an Xbox exclusive.
There are many reasons to be upset at the death of E3 but one of the most significant issues is how it makes it much harder to interview developers and industry leaders, who while unavailable the rest of the year were often at E3 and willing to do interviews.
Sean Shoptaw, for example, is Disney’s head of gaming and by his own admission rarely talks to the press. And yet he’s in charge of Star Wars, Marvel, and a host of other globally recognised IP, including 20th Century Fox properties such as Alien.
Unfortunately, it’s so rare to hear to hear from him that he can get away with saying almost nothing, simply because it’s so unusual for him to give an interview at all. However, he has implied that the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake is not dead and will likely continue with a new developer – which means it is still several years away from release.
‘Not a lot I can say on that point for some hopefully obvious reasons, but KOTOR is obviously an incredibly popular game, one that we are incredibly proud of and think that there’s still a lot of demand for. I’ll leave it there,’ he told Axios.
Although Lucasfilm Games is not mentioned, Shoptaw is presumably in charge of that, as well as a ‘group of about 100 producers, business development executives and others’.
They’ve generally done a good job in recent years, but the interview only touches on the fact that all Marvel console games other than Spider-Man have been costly flops, despite many of them being very good games.
However, Shoptaw indicates that, ‘We would go back and work with those studios again’ and states the simple fact that: ‘Games are really hard to make.’
The Knights of the Old Republic Remake was a disaster waiting to happen though, given Disney gave the job to a tiny studio with no experience of such work, when it clearly it needed a large, experienced developer.
If it’s subsequently been moved to someone more appropriate Shoptaw makes no hint at who it might be, with all his answers being disappointingly vague and unenlightening.
He did give a hint at how the process of making games based on Disney properties works, stating that they don’t shop concepts and IP to other companies but instead prefer others to come to Disney with ideas.
‘They pitched us a really compelling vision for Indy, and that resonated,’ he says of Wolfenstein developer MachineGames – who are still yet to reveal anything substantial about the game.
Since MachineGames is owned by Bethesda, the Indiana Jones game will end up as an Xbox console exclusive, with Shoptaw commentating:
‘Xbox still being one of the bigger marketplaces for games, we didn’t feel like we were going to be overly exclusionary. We felt like it’s still going to reach a broad set of folks, and we felt, financially and strategically for the game, that made sense at the time.’
None of this offers any real insight into either Disney or the specific games they’re making, but unfortunately this sort of surface level exploration of the business is as deep as most companies want to go.
A new Indiana Jones game with an original story is in development from our studio, @MachineGames, and will be executive produced by Todd Howard, in collaboration with @LucasfilmGames. It’ll be some time before we have more to reveal, but we’re very excited to share today’s news!
— Bethesda (@bethesda) January 12, 2021
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MORE : Sony erases all mention of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic remake
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MORE : Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic remake on hold amid firings
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