Respawn's Star Wars Jedi franchise tops 40 million players

According to EA's Laura Miele, the Star Wars Jedi franchise has amassed over 40 million players in its nearly five-year lifetime.

Miele revealed the milestone during an investor presentation (spotted byVGC) and said EA's entire run of Star Wars games has topped $5 billion in net bookings.

Based on those metrics, she claimed EA has "delivered some of the highest quality and best-selling Star Wars games of all-time."

It's unclear how this translates to sales for Respawn's action-adventure franchise. In fact, EA has been rather cagey when discussing the commercial performance of 2023's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which just arrived on last-generation console hardware (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) today.

The Star Wars games that were, are, and shall come to pass

EA secured an exclusivity deal to make "core" console Star Wars games in October 2014. Thus far, its output includes the Jedi games, DICE's Star Wars Battlefront duology, and EA Motive's Star Wars Squadrons.

EA's time with the franchise has also resulted in two high-profile cancellations: "Project Ragtag" from Visceral Games and a first-person shooter that was in the works at Respawn.

Following the controversial launch of DICE's Star Wars Battlefront II, Disney began letting other third-party studios make games based on the franchise. Along with Zynga's Star Wars Hunters and Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws, Quantic Dream is developing Star Wars Eclipse.

Saber Interactive, recently known for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II, is working on a remake of BioWare's 2005 game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Bit Reactor, another EA studio, is also developing a Star Wars strategy game.

Discussing what's next for the Star Wars Jedi series, Miele said Respawn is at work on a third entry that will become the "the final chapter" in the franchise. The threequel will be developed without oversight from series director Stig Asmussen, who departed Respawn in September 2023 for unknown reasons.

There have been a lot of Star Wars games, and last year, Game Developer looked back on lessons learned from the always-enduring franchise.