In Bit Reactor’s XCOM-style tactics RPG Star Wars: Zero Company, you play a custom character called Hawks who is referred to using they/them pronouns. With my armchair producer hat on, I suspect this is partly just a way to avoid recording several sets of voice lines for different player pronoun choices. But Zero Company as a whole does support expressions of gender that differ from heteronormative male and female archetypes – or at least, which differ enough to make me, a cisgender writer, curious about expressions of queerness and transness elsewhere in Star Wars.
While creating a character for the beta, I wondered about how notions of gender might differ across the humanoid species depicted in the game, including Mirialans, Devaronians and Togrutas. In the end, I created a Devaronian character with green hair and copious freckles, whom I would gingerly designate as “Trying Their Best”.
I assume that, as with other billion-dollar corporate fiction, the bulk of the really interesting work in this area is being done by ‘amateur’ fan writers and artists. But I wondered nonetheless if Bit Reactor had thought much about queerness in Star Wars, while creating a story about a former Galactic Republic officer assembling a squad of “unconventional professionals” to chase down a doomsday cult.
“I think Star Wars is about characters and uniqueness, and we wanted to support a player’s ability to represent whatever they wanted to represent as their version of Hawks,” CEO and creative director Greg Foertsch told me in an interview, after I’d spent a few hours with a beta version of the game. “There’s no canon Hawks, per se. There’s one on the box cover just for a marketing perspective, but it’s like, allowing people to explore Star Wars in a way that they want to do it, whether it’s a combination [of characteristics] that is very unique or something that’s a little more predictable.” In closing, he reiterated that “the thought behind it is to allow players to express themselves, however they want, and whatever you relate to as your thing – again, it’s your Star Wars story.”
As pro-LGBTQ+ rhetoric goes, this is pretty mild. You could characterise the ‘it’s your story, whoever you are’ sentiment as essentially handing off the politics of the representation to the player. But Foertsch seemed sincere, and as such, I was also curious to know how Bit Reactor feel about being published by the new incarnation of Electronic Arts. The day before our interview, an investor consortium consisting of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the private equity company Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners completed a $55 billion acquisition of EA, taking the 44-year-old corporation private despite much rancour from US politicians and union organisers.
Laying aside the question of an $18 billion loan – a historic and potentially ruinous debt that will require many bloody ‘efficiencies’, if EA are to stay ahead of the interest payments – the bulk of the cash has come from Saudi Arabia’s state investment wing. According to a Brazilian filing from December last year, they will own 93.4% of the newly private company, with Silver Lake taking 5.5%, and Affinity making up the remainder. Affinity are themselves flush with Saudi money in the course of Kushner’s alleged attempts to sell influence on his father-in-law, Donald Trump.
Despite some “modernisation” in recent years, much of it geared to reassure foreign companies and governments and secure revenue sources for the Kingdom beyond fossil fuels, Saudi Arabia continues to have an atrocious human rights record. The country is run by a dynasty who don’t permit political parties or elections, with the backing of a powerful order of clerics. Journalists are censored, imprisoned, and sometimes killed. Internet access is controlled. There are widespread stories about the effective enslaving of thousands of migrant workers by means of a patronage system.
Despite some relaxing of the rules, Saudi Arabia still treats women as second-class citizens. And the country is not a safe environment for queer people, save possibly for celebrity eSports players attending state-owned tournaments. According to a 2023 survey of reporting from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, there have been hundreds of arrests, fines and beatings over the past 20 years. In July 2022, a social media influencer was detained simply for flirting with another woman online.
All this comes with the qualification that I’ve done little firsthand reporting on Saudi Arabia, and that overseas commentators should be wary of their own glass houses: the UK and USA have their own proud histories of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and exploitation. The other caveat with regard to Saudi Arabia and the games industry specifically is that the PIF have made significant investments in other videogame publishers, including Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, and Activision-Blizzard. There are plenty other cases of repressive states exerting financial influence on companies abroad, directly or indirectly – Tencent, who have what Lulu Chen characterises as a symbiotic relationship with the Chinese government, are the owners of Riot Games, with a sizeable stake in Fortnite creators Epic. Any criticism of the newly private EA needs to acknowledge this murky bigger picture if it is to be convincing.
How much Saudi Arabia’s ownership of EA might lead to the cutting or censoring of teams that create games with feminist and queer elements is an open question, right now. EA Maxis have promised that “The Sims will always be a space where you can express your authentic self”, with senior character artist Jess Hyland remarking last month that she would fight any effort to sabotage representation for LGBTQIA+ players “tooth and nail”. I myself doubt that EA’s new owners will seek to impose their own values on studios such as Maxis and BioWare, providing the latter keep their mouths mostly shut about the new ownership. Give or take a few mass layoffs to service the debt, I think the Saudi Arabian government will be fine for these developers to continue as before, catering to progressive audiences in other countries, while purchases of EA games contribute to the maintenance of their authoritarian state.
All of which is obviously an argument to stop buying EA-published games for the moment. Myself, I’ll be confining my future coverage of EA to labour reporting and analysis of the business as a whole. But for what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed the few hours I’ve played of Zero Company, though I find its story and writing rather plodding. As regards the battling, it has a nifty “backup” mechanic akin to artillery spotting: each turn a randomly chosen character can enlist a squadmate to perform a follow-up attack, allowing you to score damage even if the first shot misses.
The game’s take on the genre’s overwatch mechanics is relatively focussed, partly because the maps are themselves quite compact, with no fog of war to create ambiguity about enemy position. Rather than having characters open up at anybody who strays within range, you’ll stretch out a view cone, as in Gears Tactics, to lock down a particular angle of approach. The longer the cone, the lower the accuracy of the overwatcher. It seems an assured and robust tactics RPG, created by people who didn’t choose to be in the situation they are now in.
Bit Reactor’s publishing deal with EA pre-dates the Saudi-led acquisition by several years. The publishers first mentioned the game back in January 2022, shortly after Bit Reactor’s founding, with the formal unveiling coming in April 2025, a few months before the proposed acquisition was announced. I can’t imagine how the developers might now pull out of the arrangement, weeks from Zero Company’s planned release, without incurring financial catastrophe and legal action from the publishers. But given Bit Reactor’s interest in letting people ‘tell their own story’, has the acquisition made them think twice about working with EA again?
“Our relationship with EA has been great,” Foertsch told me. “Our relationship with Lucasfilm is also amazing. It’s more about the people we work with. So yeah, time will tell. I mean, right now – like you said, our deal with them is from way before any of this, and the political part is not something that we have given a lot of thought to, at this point. We’re trying to get this thing out the door, so all that paint is pretty fresh.
“So, we’ll see,” he went on. “But again, our relationships with everybody we’ve been working with are really good, and we absolutely love the support we’ve gotten from EA and Lucas and Respawn – couldn’t ask for better people to be working with.” I should note that there were EA PR representatives on the call during the interview. They remained silent throughout all this, beyond nudging me to keep an eye on the time.