STAR WARS Holonet Weekly: It’s All About Gamers And YouTubers

For a quiet week in the galaxy, there’s been a lot of chatter among gamers and YouTubers. Let’s dive in!

This week, Electronic Arts (EA) announced the cancellation of the open world Star Wars game they had in development. They announced the game in 2017 with the working title of Ragtag. According to reports, the game was supposed to be open world with access to several planets that gamers could explore. It would feature new and old characters with a chance for fans to play a bounty hunter as they travel the galaxy. The cancellation of this game appears to be another bump in the road for the gaming company as well as Lucasfilm and Disney.

Since they teamed up in 2013 after Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, EA has produced several games on different platforms, including mobile games like Galaxy of Heroes and PC games like The Old Republic. However, they are better known for the two Star Wars Battlefront games, released in 2015 and 2017. Both games were praised for the graphics and game play. The repetitiveness and lack of maps and campaign mode were corrected in the second, but Battlefront II has been plagued by criticism over in-game micro-transactions and “loot crates”; due to the higher difficulty of unlocking features through simple gameplay, it was forcing players to spend more money to buy loot crates to get the unlockable features instead. Now there are a couple new games due out in the future from EA, which some may worry if they’ll actually be finished and released. In a statement released by the company, they try to ease the fans’ minds, stating:

There’s been speculation overnight about one of our Star Wars projects. A natural part of the creative process, the great work by our team in Vancouver continues and will evolved into future Star Wars content and games. We’re fully committed to making more Star Wars games, we’re very excited about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn, and we’ll share more about our new projects when the time is right.

Last month, YouTuber Star Wars Theory released the critically acclaimed fan film Vader Episode 1: Shards of the Past, the first in a series of films he plans on doing. Before starting his project, SWT reached out to Lucasfilm first and received their blessing with a few rules: no crowdfunding or monetization once the film was released, to which he gladly agreed. With a budget if $100,000, he produced and released it, and it has been viewed over 7.2 million times.

On January 14^th, SWT was notified by Disney and their partner company Warner Chappell, that they had placed a copyright claim on his film and were going to monetize the film themselves, collecting the money from the ad revenue. Their reason to the claim: the score. According to Disney and Warner Chappell, the fan film uses a rendition of the Imperial March, which falls under their copyright option. SWT did hire a composer to make an original score for the film, and naturally the new music is in the style of John Williams’ score. SWT was given the option to appeal, but decided to just let it go due to the cost, the likelihood he would lose, and the possibility that he would be forced to shut down his YouTube channel. He did state that he would continue with the next film without using any Star Wars themes or scores.

Then just two days later on January 16^th, Star Wars Theory posted that after the backlash from other Star Wars fans, Lucasfilm stepped in and told Disney and Warner Chappell that he had made the film under their rules and to drop the copyright claim, which they did. It’s good to see that Lucasfilm put a stop to this and is sticking up for the fans. SWT has stated that he’s not interested in anything more than sharing his vision for Star Wars with other fans for entertainment. Which is a good thing. This film was great and we all look forward for his next installment.

Nothing much has been released this week on the many Star Wars projects that ware currently in production. But there is speculation that fans will finally get a first look at The Mandalorian around April 11^th, which is the day that Star Wars Celebration opens. According to Variety’s Digital Editor Todd Spangler, Disney will have a demonstration of their new streaming service, Disney+, which will also include first looks at some of its new original content. This is exciting since we’ve only seen one official photo and since it’s Star Wars Celebration, chances of also seeing the first trailer for Episode IX is very likely as well.

Disney says it will demo Disney+ at its investor day on April 11, including first look at some of the original content for the SVOD service

— Todd Spangler (@xpangler) January 18, 2019

That’s all we got for this week. Keep an eye out for our next Holonet as well as the start of season 4 of Salacious Crumbs!