(Image credit: Secret Mode)
We've had two Star Wars games in 2026, both of them quite good and neither of them quite what you might expect from the Star Wars mould: Zero Company, an XCOM-style tactics game, and Galactic Racer, an arcade racing game but Star Wars. And the success of those games means we may see more like them—which is to say, more offbeat Star Wars games from smaller-scale studios—in the future.
Both Zero Company and Galactic Racer were developed by independent studios—Bit Reactor and Fuse Games, respectively—and that "very much is part of the strategy," Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly told The Game Business.
"Obviously, huge triple-A games like Battlefront are always going to be an essential part of the strategy," Reilly said. "But one of the great things about Star Wars is it has all kinds of other opportunities to tell stories in different genres.
"The goal has been to find the best partner who makes that experience come alive inside the galaxy far, far away. And it doesn’t have to always be triple-A, sometimes it can be double-A, and it’s really about the experience that we’re delivering and the fantasy we’re fulfilling."
That's a real shift in Disney's approach to making Star Wars games. Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 and shuttered its games division the following year; not long after that, it signed a 10-year deal with Electronic Arts, granting it exclusive rights to make Star Wars games. That deal was not especially fruitful, and Ubisoft's big-budget Star Wars Outlaws, announced in the waning years of the EA deal, didn't exactly set the world on fire either.
Disney also resurrected Lucasfilm Games in 2021, making it "the official identity for all gaming titles from Lucasfilm"—which, as the sizzle reel made clear, meant Star Wars games—and it's "tried to be more flexible about who we’re willing to take pitches from," Reilly said.
"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. There are some hurdles. 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."
Of course, there are plenty of familiar-looking Star Wars games in the trench too: Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a new addition to the Knights of the Old Republic series, was announced at The Game Awards in 2025, the third and supposedly last Star Wars Jedi game is in development, Quantic Dream is still plugging away on Star Wars: Eclipse, despite recent reports of struggles, and yes, that KOTOR remake is, somehow, still happening.
