Lucasfilm Games plans to keep handing Star Wars to smaller independent studios, according to vice president Douglas Reilly, who pointed to this year's Star Wars Zero Company and Star Wars: Galactic Racer as the model. Speaking to The Game Business, as reported by PC Gamer, Reilly said working with independent developers "very much is part of the strategy."
Both games came from outside the usual big-publisher pipeline. Zero Company, an XCOM-style tactics game, was made by Bit Reactor, while the arcade racer Galactic Racer comes from Fuse Games.
"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." He added that the projects do not always need to be triple-A, and that "sometimes it can be double-A."
Reilly said the division has "tried to be more flexible about who we're willing to take pitches from," and that "Good ideas can come from a lot of different places." There are limits: he noted Lucasfilm has a high quality bar, so it usually works with experienced teams rather than ones with no track record.
PC Gamer frames this as a real change of direction. Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, closed its games division the next year, and then signed a 10-year exclusive Star Wars deal with Electronic Arts. Ubisoft's big-budget Star Wars Outlaws followed late in that era. Lucasfilm Games was revived in 2021 as the label for all of the company's games.
How the two games have landed
Galactic Racer launched on October 6 for PC, PS5 and Xbox, according to Gamebonk's release tracker. Game Developer reports it has regularly reached 18,000 concurrent players on Steam with a "mostly positive" user rating, and Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster told VGC that sales are "healthy."
Webster has also detailed how Fuse built the game. Per Game Developer, citing his interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Galactic Racer was effectively made by a core team of 75, though its credits list roughly 1,100 professional roles. Fuse split the work across three tiers of outside help:
- Outsourcers delivered specific assets against a clear brief.
- External developers built self-contained parts of the game; the photo mode came from an outside studio and was slotted in using Unreal Engine.
- Co-developers worked as an extension of the core team, joining stand-ups and Slack.
Zero Company has drawn praise too. Eurogamer's review calls it a "turn-based tactics gem" set in the late Clone Wars era, with a default difficulty pitched at genre newcomers and harder modes available. The review notes many Bit Reactor developers have backgrounds at XCOM studio Firaxis, and that staff were furloughed for about a month before the game came out, which the reviewer says shows in some rough edges.
Bigger projects are still coming
The smaller games sit alongside a slate of more familiar ones. PC Gamer lists Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, announced at The Game Awards in 2025; a third and reportedly final Star Wars Jedi game; Quantic Dream's Star Wars: Eclipse, which has faced reports of struggles; and the Knights of the Old Republic remake, which is still in the works.
