Could Sony’s Bungie Build the Next Star Wars Battlefront Game?

While dev Bungie massages Marathon and revives Destiny 2’s cut content, it could be in talks to take on a new project.

According to rumourmonger Quarterman – as revealed by Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb during his Game Mess Mornings podcast – the Sony studio may be under consideration to continue the Star Wars Battlefront franchise.

This is very much classic rumourmill territory, so take all of this with a huge pinch of salt, but Quarterman says Disney has been buoyed by the ongoing success of Star Wars Battlefront 2, which attracted an enormous influx of players out of the blue last summer.

(It even went on to top the PS4 sales charts for several months.)

“The suits at Lucasfilm have been aggressively deploying probe droids for a development partner to take on the task of creating a follow-up,” Quarterman writes, as read by Grubb.

The report goes on to say that candidates include EA DICE – which made the previous two modern Battlefront games – and Bungie.

This is a really interesting rumour, because I think the ex-Halo dev is absolutely capable of creating a cracking Battlefront game. It just depends whether that fits into Sony’s plans for the studio.

Battlefront would obviously come with a huge licensing fee attached, but it would certainly be a sure hit. It’d also probably be an “easier” project than a hypothetical Destiny 3 – although it would no doubt still cost many, many millions of dollars to make.

I’m a bit sceptical of this story overall, because the Quarterman is a pen name for Electronic Gaming Monthly’s editor, and this reads like one of those old rumour columns you used to find in old magazines. (Which were almost always entirely made up.)

The timing is interesting, however, because earlier today we reported on comments from Lucasfilm executive Douglas Reilly, who noted there are more surprising Star Wars collaborations in the works.

Bungie would certainly be a surprise collaboration, and I think a lot of people would be very excited about what the Washington team could do with a new Battlefront game.

Sony already has strong relationships with the licensing department at Disney, courtesy of its work on the Spider-Man games.

So while I don’t really buy this particular rumour entirely, it’s something I could see happening if the stars aligned.