This week, a new Star Wars CCG was announced for PC and mobile and, exciting though that is for fans like us, it's pretty darn mysterious right now, with details very thin on the ground. However, Wargamer can reveal there's a bit more to this development squad than meets the eye.
The official Star Wars website's December 9 announcement says Lucasfilm Games, Zero36 Studio, and CCG Lab are "teaming up" to create the game, and that we'll be able to build decks with characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (shocker). That's all the information officially revealed so far.
Taking a closer look at the game's listed developers, however, we notice some interesting things. Lucasfilm Games needs no introduction - but what about those other two studios?
Zero36 Studio is a subsidiary of Chinese tech firm and TikTok owner ByteDance, and was the distributor of Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage, a mobile rhythm game with over 10 million downloads. ByteDance has form in these games, with another subsidiary, NuVerse, publishing the blockbusting juggernaut that is Marvel Snap.
What's CCG Lab, then? On its website, the studio says it has a "proprietary digital Collectible Card Game (CCG) engine" and that its name stands for "Clever, Compelling Gameplay". It says its leadership team "has more than 70 years of experience bringing some of the greatest collectible card games in the world to market" - but the site doesn't mention any previous games CCG Lab has worked on.
In fact, based on its website alone, it would be fair to assume that this is a new company and that the new Star Wars card game is its first project. It isn't, though. According to its own LinkedIn page, CCG Lab was founded in 2020 by its CEO Cory Jones, and since then has worked on developing at least one game: DC Dual Force, a free-to-play digital card game based on the DC Comics Universe, which it launched on October 17, 2023.
Dual Force, whose now defunct Steam store page lists CCG Lab as the only developer, survived for just four months before shutting down on February 29, 2024 and refunding all microtransactions. It's not clear exactly what went wrong with this title, but the Steam page lists an average review score of 47%. The reviews ranked 'most helpful' praise Dual Force's visuals, but complain of bugs and lament the lack of a mobile version.
Wargamer has reached out to CCG Lab to ask about the plans for the new Star Wars digital card game, and what lessons from the DC Dual Force experience are going into the making of the new title.
We don't know when this new Star Wars game will be released, or what it means for Asmodee, which holds licencing for Star Wars tabletop games. Asmodee has its own Stars Wars CCG in Star Wars Unlimited. We've not heard any rumors about a digital version of Unlimited, but obviously now if Asmodee wanted to make one, there'd be a direct competitor already on the market.
It'll be interesting, therefore, to see how this new game compares to Unlimited, and if it'll be sufficiently different to stand apart.
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