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What happened to Star Wars: Hunters? The free-to-play mobile and Switch shooter, which takes place between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, was just released in June of 2024. But less than a year later, developer Zynga announced that service on the game would be ended in October of 2025. That's a very short timeframe considering the modern popularity of both arena shooter games and the Star Wars IP, but according to Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau, it's the latter that was one of the game's biggest problems.

Gibeau recently sat down with The Game Business to discuss the rise and fall of Star Wars: Hunters, and during the chat, revealed that the company's working relationship with Star Wars IP holders Lucasfilm did not amount to what they'd hoped it to be.

"We built a great tech base and a fun game," Gibeau said. "The problem was it wasn't a viable business. We weren't able to generate the organic installs from the license."

"We had some issues with how we could explore the intellectual property," continued Gibeau, "Could you play Darth Vader or could you not? That sort of thing. We ended up with a cross-platform game on Switch and mobile that ran perfectly. It was fun. But it didn't engage over the long term. And it wasn't a viable business."

That being said, the gang at Zynga are choosing to live and learn in regards to not just this game, but all future games they'll produce alongside popular IP-holders.

"We don't really consider them failures at the company," concludes the gaming exec. "It's very difficult to get new products out on mobile in a successful way. You're going to have a lot of misses and you have to have a strong stomach and a culture for learning that oriented to: 'hey, it missed. Why did it miss? Why don't we try this instead?' For every game that doesn't reach its full potential, we go back, postmortem it, figure out what went right, what went wrong on the team, on the tech, on the go-to-market. Any number of reasons. And then we apply that and share that learning across the company."

Star Wars: Hunters is available on the iOS and Switch until October 1 of 2025.

Get to know, understand, and love the Star Wars franchise more with our Star Wars watch order, guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies & TV shows, and all the Star Wars movies and Star Wars TV shows ranked.