To be honest I think the problem was that "Battlefront II" garnered very mixed reception. I've heard a lot of fanatical fans, but also a ton who say that they thought the game was both terrible, and most importantly pointless. I'm not sure how much money it would make when you consider liscencing concerns and everything else.
The power of the Star Wars liscence is also debatable, I look at ToR as an example of a game that should have raked in tons of cash if everything about the liscence is to be believed, but it didn't, indeed it's barely hanging on.
To be honest there are old Star Wars franchises I'd like to see more of. Another SINGLE PLAYER Old Republic RPG, An updated relaunch of Star Wars Galaxies, etc... but for one reason or another none of those are going to happen either. Knights Of The Old Republic II was a mess, and SoE is simply put cheap and doesn't want to put in the dev time or take care of their products, something starts failing they swing an axe at it instead of working on it and the problems and/or producing new content.
Rather than trying to resurrect Battlefront, which I don't think ever really had quite that big a following, or any of the other things I mention above for that matter, I think they should largely move on to other IPs.
If I was actually going to try and develop a "Star Wars" project, I'd probaby be looking towards MMORPG space, as much of a burn as ToR was (making it unlikely), I think the key to doing such a game "right" is to have both ground and space components in the same game, as well as taking a long term approach towards making money. I look towards the relative resurrection of "Star Trek Online" which went from nearly dead, to a Juggernaut once they got it fixed up, it having just won a big FTP award despite being 3 years old, and gotten big enough where we're now having queues form to login and enough players/ships to blot out the stars at times. I kind of suspect this was because despite the stumbling that the devs understood that the key to the property was to have both focus on the people and their adventures and the ships, in ToR they messed it up by having everything focused on the ground, with the ship combat being turned into a tunnel shooter mini-game. For any big science fiction MMO you need to have both (which Battlefront provided but only as a dedicated shooter ironically), and it kind of burns that before SWG went down it actually had the two interacting where you could fly your ships above the planets people were walking around on.... looking at this is the place science fiction MMORPGs need to pick up from, the person who does that is going to make a bundle.
. You rock on podcasts.
