Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Electronic Arts has been sold to a Saudi Arabia-based investment group and it isn't clear what that means for our beloved Wing Commander IP. But according to an article on GamesRadar it could mean that Wing Commander and other unused IPs will be sold, licensed or adapted as mobile games. They spoke to a former EA manager who made the claim:

That's an idea posited by Emmanuel Rosier, who served as a high-level manager at EA for the better part of a decade, apprising the company of industry and market trends likely to affect their fortunes. Now he's the director of market intelligence at the third-party industry analysis firm Newzoo, and recently spoke to PC Gamer about the situation EA now finds itself in.

"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."

EA's taking $20 billion in debt as part of the buyout, and it's widely expected that mass layoffs are going to be a big part of getting that debt under control. Selling off old IPs could be a way to get the cash flowing in a hurry, and as much of a struggle as it's seemingly been for BioWare to even get Mass Effect 5 made, I have my doubts that anyone's going to be able to convince the higher-ups at EA – never mind the even higher-ups in the new ownership group – to sign off on a big-budget revival of an even older series.

"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," Rosier says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."
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We would love to see anything happen with the Wing Commander IP at this point, but we should underline the fact that this is all very speculative. Online discourse has rapidly turned this into 'Wing Commander is for sale!' and that isn't really what this is saying… though it is nice to see Wing Commander highlighted and Colonel Blair's face all over the place for a while!

It also isn't clear from the article what Emmanuel Rosier did at Electronic Arts. A Google search suggests he's basically 'the guy they ask for quotes like this' with dozens of similar articles about things like Mass Effect and Dragon Age… but all credit him with vague terms like "high-level manager" instead of explaining any experience. His LinkedIn credits him as "Senior Franchise Demand Planning Manager" from 2014 to 2019 which suggests that… maybe he's the sonofabitch responsible for not doing anything with these IPs in the first place?




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Original update published on August 25, 2026
 
kingmakeress said:
EA? Planning? How?

Also, do you know the status of the book rights? Are they separate?
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Electronic Arts has those. I explored licensing new books through Chris a few years back (since they had put out the HarperCollins stuff for the movie) but the lawyers came back and said we'd need EA's involvement and that that wasn't going to happen.
 
Makes sense, private equity needs to make a ROI, so they're going to divest unused IPs to make back quick money by selling unused assets. Anything EA is sitting on but not making money with will be sold.

The only question is what happens with existing licenses - the games GoG sells, the e-books, etc. The new IP owner might rescind all those so they can release the next WC gatcha game to make a quick buck.

The WC IP will be sold or divested, no doubt about it. The only real question is what the new owner will do to existing licenses and what they might release.
 
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Maze59077 said:
Lets buy the Wing Commander License from them 😜😊
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If I had unlimited funds, I would buy the IP today and put an army of programmers to work on the following projects:
- Wing Commander 1& 2 VR
- Privateer VR.
- Privateer TV series.
- Privateer 3.
- Wing Commander VI
- Wing Commander Academy TV series
- Wing Commander: Kilrathi
- Wing Commander Racer
- Recipe Book Frontier
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Electronic Arts has those. I explored licensing new books through Chris a few years back (since they had put out the HarperCollins stuff for the movie) but the lawyers came back and said we'd need EA's involvement and that that wasn't going to happen.
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So... dead end?
 
I must be getting old or something. My first thought, when hearing about possibilities like this, is "Leave it be! Let it rest, and let us keep our memories intact."

What can I say, given what's been done with Star Wars and Star Trek, I actually find it difficult to believe anyone would do a good job with this, without "updating" it for the mythical "modern audience". To be honest, even though I did so much on Unknown Enemy and Standoff, I don't know if I would even trust myself to touch it. Wing Commander is dated in some ways. It's very 1990s. It's very teenage. I love it for that exact reason, but I think it would be very difficult to retain that old Wing Commander feel and still appeal... no, not even to the "modern audience", but to us Wing Commander fans. We're all nearly three decades older than we were when Prophecy came out. We're different than we were back then, we have a different attitude to life, we like different jokes than we did, and so on, and so on.

All those misgivings aside, there is one title out there that says to me - yes, as a matter of fact, it can be done right. That title is Top Gun. So, it's not impossible. It can be done damn well. It's just very infrequent.

Ok, but now that I thought about Top Gun and how they managed to achieve this, now I'm thinking - actually, yeah, I would definitely be up for it. In the last decade, I've mostly just been teaching game design, and not doing much work with games, but... yeah, for Wing Commander, I'd be willing to come back to active duty ;) .
 
I can understand all the skepticism, but it would at least be exciting to have anything new. If it fails, it fails. It will not take away our old games and our memories of them. It might be time to try out something new.

But I wonder: How would the community to react to a new Wing Commander game that is not AAA? We only know Wing Commander as the AAA franchise and it is most definitely not that anymore. If it ever gets revived, it probably will be as a low to mid budget game since the genre is effectively dead. Would you be fine with it?

And at least me personally, I wouldn't want another FPS/RPG hybrid, but a pure action game with a story focus. I wouldn't even want to have a Privateer like game right now.

Quarto said:
All those misgivings aside, there is one title out there that says to me - yes, as a matter of fact, it can be done right. That title is Top Gun. So, it's not impossible. It can be done damn well. It's just very infrequent.
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Now that you mentioned it: Strike Commander would probably the better IP to do something with right now. Something like Ace Combat could be feasible...
 
Evan said:
But I wonder: How would the community to react to a new Wing Commander game that is not AAA? We only know Wing Commander as the AAA franchise and it is most definitely not that anymore. If it ever gets revived, it probably will be as a low to mid budget game since the genre is effectively dead. Would you be fine with it?
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This is a bridge we've already crossed in a way, and it's a dangerous path, though not impossible. Granted, in Wing Commander's heyday, we had first Academy, then Armada and Privateer. Not to mention that basically every single expansion pack, from SM1&2, all the way to the stand-alone Secret Ops, were effectively low-to-mid budget games. However, these existed in the context of the big games, and shone with reflected light - as far as I know, none of these titles (except Privateer, maybe, which was something of a break-out) were ever so popular that they would have themselves been enough to revive the series if it had been in trouble.

Then we get to Arena in 2007. By this time, the series is effectively dead, though still well-remembered - it was less than a decade since the last game at that time. And Arena is effectively a low-budget attempt to revive the series - and it proves to be a failure. Now, this is in no way criticising the game itself, which I know many people enjoyed (I, sadly, never had a chance to play it), but the fact remains that it didn't pull in enough people to warrant any further work.

Does this mean a low-budget revival is a bad way to go? Not necessarily. Arena was very specific, in that it was locked to a single platform, and it wasn't even the platform of choice for Wing Commander fans, who had obviously been predominantly PC-based. It was very alienating for the audience in this regard - yes, some people bought an Xbox just to play Arena, but many others (like me) found themselves watching from the sideline, because they just didn't have the disposable income to buy a console on a whim, to play just one game. This tells me that while Arena shows the risk involved with a low-budget game aimed at reviving the franchise, it is not actually a strong piece of evidence that suggests this wouldn't work.

I think there are two ways to go with a franchise like Wing Commander. One way is to pull out all the stops, and make a big AAA game, and just hope it sticks the landing. It's a very risky way to go - it might work, or it might not (we'll see when Squadron 42 is finally released). Such a release would necessarily demand a sort of "reset" of the series - going back to the Kilrathi war, and basically running roughshod over canon if that's what it takes to write the story you need. The other way would be to make a smaller title, low-to-mid budget as you say, but be very careful to make it as canon-friendly as possible - specifically play on nostalgia, to draw in the old fans, to build a base around them. This too, of course, would involve going back to the Kilrathi (if there's one thing we can be certain of, it's that no one will make a revival set in the post-Prophecy era - what would be the point of giving up on using everything that's iconic to the series?), but it would mean being very careful to slot in with existing canon, while at the same time, making sure that it's not an esoteric game that requires deep canon knowledge to even get what's happening. The game would have to be multi-platform, of course, PC and console, and possibly even stand-alone VR consoles as well, even though they're not a significant market. In spite of its middling budget, it would definitely have to have a strong storyline and well-supported single player component - yes, you can have multiplayer as a bonus, but it can't be the core focus.

In some ways, Star Wars Squadrons provides a sort of basic recipe, even though they ultimately messed up.
 
One possibility would actually be to return to the Kilrathi War, but on a different carrier and with entirely new characters. Older ones could maybe appear in cameos if it makes sense and nothing contradicts it, and a new main character. Cutscenes then through computer graphics. So AI-created (I know you don't like the abbreviation, but you know what I mean ^^)
 
It's in a similar place to Star Wars right now... the obvious way to make money, bring back Mark Hamill and comapny to do a high quality FMV-style game, just isn't possible anymore. So everything else seems like you're leaving money on the table, which is something c-suites hate.

If you give me an unlimited budget, I'd do a prequel - the start of the Kilrathi War with a new group of characters (plus younger versions of people like Tolwyn, Eisen and Paladin). And I would steal the opening right from Pacific Strike, letting you play through a big disasterous Pearl Harbor style attack by the Kilrathi.

If you give me a realistic mid-range budget, I'll reboot Wing Commander I with an engine and style similar to Howie's Wingleader fan project for the gameplay and 1980s anime-styled 2D cutscenes for the cutscenes and talking heads.
 
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