Star Wars Battlefront 3: Bungie vs. DICE in Persistent Rumor

Lucasfilm is reportedly seeking a studio to develop Star Wars Battlefront 3, and Bungie is apparently among the contenders facing off against DICE. The information comes from the Quartermann rumor column, published in American magazine EGM, and was picked up Monday, October 19 by journalist Jeff Grubb during Giant Bomb's Game Mess Mornings show. No official announcement exists at this stage from either Lucasfilm or Bungie.

But the hypothesis warrants examination, because it involves two franchises that bear little resemblance to their former selves: Battlefront, buried by EA following the commercial failure and loot box scandal of Battlefront 2 in 2017, and Bungie, whose creative identity has been largely absorbed into Destiny 2 since Sony's acquisition in 2022.

A Studio Built on Arena FPS, Not Large-Scale Warfare

Bungie made its name with Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, followed by the trilogy that came after at Microsoft, before leaving the publisher to launch its own live-service game with Destiny. The studio excels at third- and first-person shooting, weapon balancing, and military sci-fi storytelling. What it has never delivered is a large-scale FPS with dozens of simultaneous players across open maps—an exercise where DICE has reigned supreme since Battlefield 1942 in 2002, and where the 2015 Star Wars Battlefront iteration actually built its reputation.

If the rumor pans out, Bungie would need to contend with a design brief far removed from its usual wheelhouse. Nothing currently suggests how the studio would adapt its expertise to a massive-battle format, and no interviews or postmortems indicate whether a dedicated team is already working on it internally.

A Franchise Players Never Really Left Behind

What makes the hypothesis credible is the lingering appetite for Battlefront, even as it has sat dormant for nearly nine years. The 2017 game continues running on community servers, and forums regularly resurface the topic whenever rumors like this emerge—evidence of a void that neither Star Wars Jedi: Survivor nor Star Wars Outlaws have filled in large-scale multiplayer territory. Lucasfilm Games, which has forged multiple partnerships with third-party studios in recent years, would have a clear commercial opportunity if a new Battlefront launched with a publisher capable of avoiding 2017's mistakes.

This is where the Bungie question becomes interesting for the market: a studio renowned for its artistic vision and gunplay mastery could restore creative credibility to a franchise that collective memory associates more with microtransactions than play enjoyment. But that credibility cannot be declared—it must be proven through a finished product, and Bungie has never shipped a multiplayer FPS at this scale.

The Risk of One More Project on an Already Overloaded Plate

Bungie has weathered internal turbulence for several months, marked by layoff waves at Sony Interactive Entertainment and the perpetual scaffolding that remains Destiny 2 with its successive expansions. Adding a project as massive as Battlefront 3 to that roster would require human resources the studio may not currently have available, and no source clarifies whether such development would run parallel to or replace another initiative.

Lucasfilm, too, is proceeding cautiously: the company has confirmed neither the project, the studio choice, nor even the existence of a formal bidding process between Bungie and DICE. Everything presently rests on a rumor column and a radio discussion, placing this information in the category of credible lead worth monitoring, not established fact.

What This Rumor Already Reveals About the Market

Whether Bungie ultimately lands the contract or not, the simple fact that Battlefront 3 is back on the table confirms that player demand for a large-scale Star Wars FPS never vanished, contrary to what EA's silence since 2017 might have suggested. The real question isn't who will win the contract, but whether the chosen studio can dodge the economic model that destroyed trust in the previous iteration. On that specific point, Bungie's track record with Destiny 2 monetization hardly argues in its favor.