>>
EGM's Quartermann rumour column says Lucasfilm is hunting for a studio to make Star Wars Battlefront 3, with EA DICE and Bungie interested.
A rumour column says Lucasfilm wants a Battlefront 3 and that DICE and Bungie are circling. Bungie's gunplay is elite. Its last three years are another story.
EGM's Quartermann rumour column says Lucasfilm is hunting for a studio to make Star Wars Battlefront 3, with EA DICE and Bungie interested.
Jeff Grubb read it out on Giant Bomb on 19 Oct and reckons DICE gets it, not Bungie. Nothing is in development or confirmed.
EA reportedly binned a DICE Battlefront 3 pitch in 2021 because the Disney licence ate into profits.
Bungie has had three rounds of layoffs, a US$765m Sony write-down, a struggling Marathon and a Destiny 2 U-turn.
Our take: great gunplay, wrong time. Bungie should fix its own games first, and DICE is the safe bet.
Star Wars Battlefront 3 might finally be a thing. Maybe. Disney is reportedly shopping the sequel around for a developer, and the two studios said to be sniffing around it are the obvious pick, EA DICE, and the one nobody saw coming: Bungie.
Before anyone starts pre-ordering, know where this came from. It isn’t a leak from inside Lucasfilm. It’s the Quartermann rumour column in the revived EGM (issue #265), which Jeff Grubb read out on Giant Bomb’s Game Mess Mornings on 19 October. GameRant then ran it as “Grubb reports”. Grubb’s own verdict on air: he doesn’t think Bungie gets it, and he expects it to go to DICE. This is a rumour, so file it accordingly.
The 2017 Battlefront 2 launch was a loot box disaster bad enough that governments got involved, and EA’s “sense of pride and accomplishment” reply became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. DICE fixed the game, stripped out the pay-to-win stuff and built it into something people genuinely love, then moved on to Battlefield.
In 2021 Tom Henderson reported that EA knocked back a DICE pitch for a third game. Under the Disney licence deal, it would have needed roughly 20% more sales to make the same money as a Battlefield. EA’s exclusive Star Wars deal has since ended, which is why Lucasfilm can shop the project to anyone.
The demand is clearly there. Battlefront 2 hit an all-time Steam peak of 35,892 players in June 2025 off the back of a cheap sale, and the team behind the community Kyber launcher says it topped 122,000 players across platforms in May this year. That’s for a game that hasn’t had a content update in years.
Bungie made Halo and Destiny, and its gunplay is arguably the best feel in the business. Nobody’s arguing with that bit. The problem is everything else since Sony bought the studio for US$3.6 billion in 2022:
In September, Torkan opened Bungie’s “Next Chapter” video with: “We lost trust. We lost incredible colleagues. And our ambitions as a studio stalled.” Hard to argue with that one, too.
Is Bungie making Battlefront 3 a good idea? Right now, no. Not because it can’t make a great Star Wars shooter. Renegades proved it can make blasters feel ace. The trouble is that Bungie has just told its own players it’s trying to win back their trust, bring back the Destiny content it deleted, and rebuild Marathon into a different game. Most of the Destiny team is gone. Adding a huge licensed shooter with Disney approvals on every lightsaber hilt isn’t a comeback plan. It’s a third thing to drop.
There’s also the money side. Battlefront 2 nearly died because the launch was built around monetisation instead of the game. Bungie’s recent track record is paid content getting vaulted, Eververse and $100 editions. Lucasfilm should be very careful whose hands it puts the sequel in.
DICE is the obvious answer, and Battlefield 6 shows it’s back on form. Grubb reckons it goes to DICE too. If Bungie wants a shot, it should fix Destiny and Marathon first and then put its hand up. Until someone official says anything, though, this is a gossip column and a podcast. Take it with a whole Sarlacc of salt.
Your call: DICE, Bungie, or someone else entirely? Tell us in the comments or come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.
ARC Raiders lost 92% of its Steam players between launch and September. Frozen Trail and a free weekend brought them back, and a week later they're st...
Steam has had more new games in 2026 than all of 2025, and it's only October. A study of 53,597 releases says AI-labelled games make up most of the gr...
Modern Warfare 4's campaign early access is "Very Positive" on Steam, with around 92% of 3,000+ reviews thumbs up. That makes it the best-received Cal...
Comments 0
Quick check before we post that