While Star Wars as a brand is in a state of figuring some things out, the gaming side of Star Wars seems to be doing a bit of the same. As we near the 4th quarter of 2024, this year has seen the release of both Star Wars Hunters and Star Wars Outlaws, two very different types of games, from two different studios. While SW Hunters did not get released with the same fanfare as SW Outlaws, our staff has spent significant time playing both games even writing about how One Month Later, Star Wars Hunters continues to be Enjoyable.
Star Wars Hunters was released in mid-May 2024, they have since added two new characters to their games with 2-month long battle pass seasons as they look to keep the game fresh with new characters for each season, new maps and more. Early reports stated that the game generated $10 million in the first week with nearly 800k downloads, but expectations around SW Hunters were not nearly as high as the developing studio, Zynga, is known for FarmVille, Merge Dragons and other mobile games, and the game was not heavily marketed upon release. In fact, it took 2 days for news to get to me that it was even available, and I am in this industry on a daily basis. Lifetime data from appmagic.rocks shows about 2 million downloads in total and about 200k of those in the last 30 days.
However, for Star Wars Outlaws, the expectations were much, much higher. Developed by Ubisoft and backed by a heavy marketing budget that their own CEO called “the biggest marketing campaign ever so far for a Ubisoft game,” early data showed that sales of SW Outlaws was far lower than expected. In addition, Ubisoft revised their financial targets after “soft” sales of Star Wars Outlaws, as reported by gamesindustry.biz this month. While the story of Kay Vess and the SW Outlaws game are fantastic, the game has been met with significant criticism and some real Star Wars fatigue. I personally enjoy the game and hope that things improve, but the early data is concerning.
The Star Wars Jedi franchise is said to have confirmed that they will end the Cal Kestis trilogy with a 3rd game to follow Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor. While Respawn Entertainment has had tremendous success with the first two titles, a timeline for the 3rd game is not known but will conclude the focus on Cal Kestis. What that means to his story though is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, while new games continue to be added, there is one steady, consistent Star Wars game that typically gets overlooked – Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. I will admit, I have some bias here. I have been playing SWGoH since release having downloaded it in early December 2015 and have not missed a day of logging in now in nearly 9 years. While the game seemed to go through a phase where the developers forgot it existed at one point, the new Raids every 6-9 months and character release schedule, in my opinion, have stabilized things and keep the game fresh enough for whales like myself to keep coming back. Lifetime earnings for SWGoH are in the $2 billion range, after hitting the $1 billion mark in January 2020, but data from appmagic shows around 500k new downloads in the past 30 days, a good sign for this legacy Star Wars gaming title.
By Luke Jernigan, aka ljcool110
Luke Jernigan is a huge Star Wars fan and was the founder of Gaming-fans.com and StarWars-fans.com. He has been writing about Star Wars games for over 7 years and was a member of the EA Capital Games GameChanger program while it existed for SWGoH.