During today’s investor update, EA said it plans to release a “large IP” sometime before March 31, 2023. There’s a good chance it’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Respawn’s 2019 adventure game Jedi: Fallen Order. First, though, a few words from EA CEO Andrew Wilson on why EA doesn’t clarify what this “core intellectual property” is.
“The nature of marketing in our industry has changed a lot in the last five or six years,” Wilson said. “You may remember that when we launched Apex Legends, we didn’t tell anyone about it for about 48 hours before the community was able to play it. The big shift, of course, in the last decade has been the shift from TV marketing to digital marketing. We’ve moved into more focused digital, and we’ve now moved into more precise digital timing, so for every franchise, our development and marketing teams come together and consider what is the best time to start meaningful communication with our community about the future. games.”
It seems like a way too long to say that EA had some thoughts about when to start marketing and decided that close to the game’s release was a good time. EA originally teased this upcoming unrevealed game in its investor slideshow this May, where “major intellectual property” was listed for early next year along with “partner game”, “remake” and “sports game”. At the time, the “partner game” was rumored to be Jedi: Survivor, but it now seems clear that EA was referring to Koei Tecmo Wild Hearts, which it publishes under the EA Originals label. The “remake” on the list is Dead Space, whose January release date was announced very recently, and the sports game is the new Super Mega Baseball. It remains only to reveal the “main IP”.
EA previously announced that Jedi: Survivor will be released in 2023, and Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb has been claiming for months that the game will be released in March 2023, according to his sources. Grubb echoed that claim a couple of weeks ago, stating that the “major partnership game” coming from EA early next year will be Jedi: Survivor. The recent PlayStation database leak also placed a release date for Jedi: Survivor in March.
