There’s a new and potentially exciting disturbance in the Force: Disney reportedly wants a new Star Wars Battlefront game, and it’s eyeing two potential developers to tackle the project. One of those choices is unsurprising, while the other is supposedly Halo, Destiny, and Marathon studio Bungie. If true, long-suffering Star Wars shooter fans might finally get the Battlefront 3 they’ve wanted for more than 20 years.
The source of the new Star Wars Battlefront rumor comes from an unexpected place: the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly and the legendary video game rumormonger “Quarterman.”
A new Star Wars Battlefront 3 rumor is swirling
How did EGM, a magazine that hasn’t published a new issue since summer 2014, come to reveal this juicy Star Wars Battlefront 3 rumor? A brand-new print issue of the long-defunct magazine, coming as part of the Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium Kickstarter campaign, features that juicy rumor. The EGM Compendium campaign featured a $250,000 stretch goal that, if reached, would result in a 265th issue of the legendary gaming magazine, complete with contributions from former EGM staffers and other gaming industry luminaries. The campaign crossed $1.7 million in pledges back in 2024, ensuring that the compendium and multiple stretch goals would come to fruition.
Last week, EGM Compendium’s creators confirmed that the brand-new issue of EGM is finally going to print. It will include new reviews and, apparently, a new Quarterman rumors column. One of those rumors was revealed during Monday’s Game Mess Mornings on Giant Bomb, with reporter (and new EGM contributor) Jeff Grubb spilling the following beans:
“Disney has big plans for the Star Wars Battlefront series,” Grubb said, reading from the magazine’s rumor pages. “Recognizing how EA’s Battlefront 2 has sustained popularity that other Star Wars media could only dream of […] you’d think they’d green light Battlefront 3 toot sweet.”
Grubb read on, saying, “The suits at Lucasfilm have been aggressively deploying probe droids looking for a development partner to take on the task of creating a follow-up. So far, no one has fully stepped up, but yours truly is hearing two major game studios are circling the project like a couple of snow speeders, led by the completely unsurprising EA DICE, who we can hope learn from their loot box lesson. There is another. The Qman hears that if the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and Marathon developer Bungie.”
Who is Quarterman, anyway?
It’s worth noting that Grubb explains that EGM’s Quarterman was “a pen name for the news editor at the time.” Whether Grubb himself contributed the news report about Star Wars Battlefront 3 to EGM under an assumed name is unclear, but the Giant Bomb personality adds, “It doesn’t sound like the game is in the works yet, but it does sound like there are conversations at the very least about who should take it on.”
EA DICE has developed two games in the Star Wars Battlefront franchise. The first, Star Wars Battlefront, was released in 2015 for PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. The game featured characters, vehicles, and settings primarily drawn from George Lucas’ original trilogy era. In 2017, DICE released a sequel, Star Wars Battlefront 2, which expanded the setting to include the Clone Wars and Star Wars sequel eras.
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A decade earlier, LucasArts and developer Pandemic released a pair of similarly titled shooters: Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars: Battlefront 2. A third game in that series was in development at Free Radical Design, but was ultimately canceled. Unauthorized and incomplete builds of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 have been released, including a Wii version of the game.
Whether an official Star Wars Battlefront 3 is happening — or whether this is all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense — remains to be seen. Electronic Arts’ exclusive license to make Star Wars games expired in 2023, though the publisher is still working on a new Star Wars Jedi game with developer Respawn Entertainment. EA DICE is busy supporting Battlefield 6 and Bungie is hard at work fixing Marathon and bringing back Destiny 2, so it’s unclear how much bandwidth either studio has to focus on a new Star Wars game. Bungie does have hands-on experience with Star Wars; last December, the studio released an official Star Wars-themed expansion for Destiny 2 titled Renegades.
With player sentiment on Battlefront 2 high and a chance to capitalize on Biddy Blas virality, Battlefront 3 seems like a perfect opportunity for Disney.