Well I was talking about differant things, including the profitability of the "Battlefront" franchise. That said you are correct that Lucasarts can't nessicarly just go and make a Star Wars game any time they want. When the rights to the Star Wars franchise are sold to other companies those companies gain exclusive rights to make products of the type they liscenced for. The original liscence holder can't just turn around and go make a game of the same sort they gave someone the rights to and effectively sell someone something, and then ruin it by competing. This applies to a lot of things, it's why for example "Universal" studios has the "Marvel Island Of Adventure" (at least for the next few years) despite Disney owning Star Wars now, and why they can't just go and make Star Wars attractions beyond what they already had until that contract expires. It's why you see things like Fox (I think it was) having the rights to the "X-men" and that preventing those characters and that part of the universe being used in other film projects that the liscense holders might want to do, etc.Veylon said:
In some cases you wind up with situations where someone buys a liscence and then sells it to a third party, or winds up with the liscence but no abillity to do anything with it, but holds onto it "just in case" or hordes liscences for as long as they can just to keep their options open, or prevent the competition from making use of them. It can get really screwed up.
On a liscencing level it's quite possible that someone else has the liscence to make Star Wars themed real time strategy games, preventing Lucasarts from doing things like "Battlefront" if they wanted to. That said, while it had it's fans, I do not think "Battlefront II" performed all that well. As I said, it seemed to me that the prices for it fell through the floor pretty quickly.
Incidently, while unrelated to any of this, I'm not sure if Sony has the liscence for "Clone Wars" anymore, but I've heard some people who think they have a rather complete liscence they aren't taking advantage of, and the recent desician to kill the "Clone Wars" cartoon despite some rather decent reception among it's target audience was in part to try and kill Sony's interest in the liscence as it's core audience dwindles, allowing it to return to the Disney/Lucas family. According to this speculation there are potential merchandising problems if Sony has that liscence if they decide to use characters in the upcoming sequels that also have a prescence in Clone Wars. Say having Obi-Wan or Yoda appear as Force Ghosts to Luke, or pretty much anything involving Anakin Skywalker. They might be able to get away with it in the movies, but if they ever wanted to do games or anything off the movies... then it could be a problem, and Star Wars has always been more about the merchandizing than the movies themselves from a financial perspective.