You can finally harness your inner Jedi in one of the newest games based on Star Wars for mobile.
Publisher Kabam announced today that the Force is coming to Star Wars: Uprising. Players may now embark on a quest to unlock these powers and to build a lightsaber. For now, the developer is positioning these Jedi capabilities as something only a “few elite” players will unlock, which is probably going to encourage diehard fans of the massively multiplayer mobile game to put a lot of time — and potentially money — into finishing these challenges as quickly as possible. With the mobile gaming market approaching $30 billion in revenue this year, having these kinds of events is key to capturing that cash.
The timing of this quest also comes as we are a week away from the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in theaters, and box-office analysts are already predicting that movie could make $615 million in its opening weekend worldwide. That excitement has The Walt Disney Company updating all of its Star Wars mobile games, including Star Wars: Commander, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and Star Wars Rebels: Missions, to keep fans engaged.
These amalgamation of factors means that players are likely going to swarm the App Store and Google Play looking for Star Wars-related content. That should give a boost to Uprising on its own, but then as those players flood the game, they may end up pouring cash into the game to get the lightsaber status symbol.
This isn’t the first time a Star Wars MMO has tried to make the rank of Jedi difficult to achieve and something to aspire to. Sony Online Entertainment’s (now Daybreak Games) Star Wars: Galaxies launched with a pathway to Jedi that required a megadifficult, multistep process that would take a significant time investment from players. SOE eventually reworked that because players didn’t want to wait to become Jedi — and some responded with harsh criticism that it had become too easy to wield the Force afterward.