Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau has claimed thatStar Wars: Huntersisn’t considered a failure by the studio, despite support being stopped less than a year after its global release.
Although it seems likeStar Wars has been going from strength to strength in the gaming world ever since Jedi: Fallen Order, that doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable. Perhaps the mostnoteworthy example of this in the past few years was Zynga’s Star Wars: Hunters, a squad-based arena shooter on mobile and Switch that sadly didn’t stand the test of time.
If you’re wondering which Star Wars game Hunters even is, you’ll probably remember it as theone that let you play as two Jawas standing on top of each other.
Star Wars: Hunters only just had its global release in June of 2024, but Zynga announced earlier this year that the gamewould see no more support after April and would eventually be shut down for good this October. That might seem like a bit of a disaster, but Zynga’s CEO doesn’t view it that way.
Star Wars: Hunters apparently wasn’t a failure, even though it didn’t last a full year
“It was fun, but it didn’t engage over the long term”
Yesterday,The Game Business shared an exclusive interview with Zynga’s CEO, Frank Gibeau, which included an interesting run down of what happened to Star Wars: Hunters. Gibeau was fairly open about what went wrong with Hunters, but goes as far as saying that it isn’t considered a failure.
Gibeau said that the team at Zynga built “a great tech base and a fun game”, but that Hunters wasn’t a “viable business” despite being attached to the Star Wars license. That license also caused some headaches, as Zynga had trouble knowing what they could do with Star Wars license, with Gibeau specifically noting that the team didn’t know if Darth Vader could be playable.
Again, all of this sounds like it’d be fair to call it a failure, but Gibeau is more positive about Hunters' fate. He notes that when it comes to running studios, “sometimes you’ll miss on the first shot”, but that there’s always something of value in it with what you can teach and learn from the situation.
“We don’t really consider them failures at the company. It’s very difficult to get new products out on mobile in a successful way. You’re going to have a lot of misses. - Frank Gibeau
Overall, Gibeau noted that Star Wars: Hunters and anything else like it aren’t considered “failures” due to how difficult it is to get mobile games up to a viable point. It seems that Zynga is wanting to take what it learned from Star Wars: Hunters and apply it to another license altogether, which could be interesting to see. Here’s hoping this one makes more of an impact.
