Star Wars Battlefront 3 Could Land at Bungie, as Lucasfilm Reportedly Weighs the Halo and Destiny Studio Against EA DICE - Wccftech

[UPDATED] According to Joe Brammer, CEO of Bulkhead Games (the British studio behind the recent successful military shooter Wardogs), the choice has already been made: Star Wars Battlefront 3 is in development at DICE and Respawn, in what would definitely be an interesting collaboration.

[ORIGINAL STORY] The Electronic Gaming Monthly comeback has delivered a truly eyebrow-raising rumor. According to the new issue of EGM's legendary Quartermann column, Lucasfilm is shopping around Star Wars Battlefront 3, and the frontrunners to make it are EA DICE and, surprisingly, Bungie.

The rumor was spotted by Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb, who read out the full passage on his latest podcast. Here’s what the Quartermann wrote in EGM #265:

Others are also telling the Q that Disney has big plans for the Star Wars Battlefront series. Recognizing how EA’s Battlefront 2 has sustained popularity that other Star Wars media can only dream of, like Mandalorian and Grogu, you’d think they’d greenlight Battlefront 3 tout de suite. And you’d be wrong. According to what your intrepid rumormonger has dug up, the suits at Lucasfilm have been aggressively deploying probe droids 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 snowspeeders—led by the completely unsurprising EA DICE, who we can hope learned from their loot box lesson. Duh. We can expect that one. Here’s the other one: There is another. The Quartermann hears that if the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and Marathon developer Bungie.

Grubb was encouraged by the idea of a new Battlefront, but shared his healthy skepticism about the Bungie part:

I got to say I’m encouraged by this idea here that, okay, they do sound like they want to pursue a new Star Wars Battlefront, and why wouldn’t they? Except for the fact that they haven’t up to this point, which has been, I think, frustrating to a lot of fans, but wake up and smell the coffee there a little bit. It’s time to make another one. And okay, yeah, EA DICE making another one seems like the obvious thing if you can make that make sense, but I bet they have a bad taste in their mouth from working with EA for a very long time. So they are looking for other partners. But Bungie... I don’t think they’re going to make Star Wars Battlefront 3. I think it’ll go to DICE.

He did acknowledge Bungie's shooter credentials, though, before pointing to what the rumor says about the industry at large:

I think Bungie could do a good job with that game. Their gunplay would feel fantastic, and they would get all the stuff right, but it’s almost like that’s not the point of talking about that story. It just speaks to so much stuff, especially at Bungie, but in the industry at large. There was a time, not even five years ago, where the accepted wisdom at the tops of a lot of these companies was: it takes a lot of money to make a new IP. Even if we get the benefits of owning it, it’s just so much more efficient to buy something and rent it and use that IP. And that flipped really quickly. And I bet the lesson learned there is: we don’t know, actually. We’ve got to just do what’s safest in the moment. And that doesn’t necessarily feel like a Star Wars Battlefront 3 from Bungie.

The Quartermann definitely has a point about Battlefront 2's staying power. Despite receiving no content updates in years, the game had a remarkable resurgence last year, with Steam concurrent players climbing from around 1,000 to 1,500 in April 2025, then to an all-time high of 35,892 in June 2025, driven by a $4 sale. It spiked again this May, when its average Steam player count more than doubled to over 3,300 and peaked above 9,000. And according to the team behind the community-made Kyber launcher, the game peaked at over 122,000 concurrent players across platforms earlier in May.

Yet there is still no Star Wars Battlefront 3. EA's exclusive Star Wars license, which led to DICE rebooting the series with 2015's Star Wars Battlefront and 2017's Battlefront 2, has since given way to Lucasfilm working with several publishers, which explains why the company would be free to shop the project around. DICE, the developer of both modern Battlefront games, is the obvious candidate, especially with the studio riding high after Battlefield 6. Bungie, on the other hand, would be a genuinely strange choice.

For one thing, Bungie is owned by Sony, so a Bungie-made Battlefront 3 would mean a PlayStation first-party studio developing a major licensed Star Wars shooter. For another, the studio's plate is already full. Bungie's new leadership recently admitted that the studio lost players' trust and stalled its own ambitions, and laid out a plan to restore Destiny 2's vaulted content and evolve Marathon after it failed to reach as many players as hoped. Taking on Star Wars Battlefront 3 would be a big swing for a studio that just told its community it was simplifying its priorities. It would also be a betrayal of the Destiny fanbase, who would certainly prefer that Destiny 3 be made instead.

As always, take this one with a grain of salt. The Quartermann has historically been as much a gossip column as a news source, and even Grubb, who found the rumor encouraging, doesn't quite buy the Bungie angle. Besides, some of the folks at DICE are already pumped about the idea of this long-awaited sequel.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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