There are some examples of parent publishers with less-than-exemplary reputations simply letting successful child studios/publishers do their thing. Activision, for example, owns Blizzard, but plays fairly hands-off with managing them. My understanding is that Ubisoft (based in France) gives a similar amount of independence to its subsidiary Montreal studio.

On the flipside, I'm not sure about how EA manages all its subsidiaries. There was a apparently a lot of political pressure on Bioware to adopt EA's Frostbite engine leading to all sorts of headache in the development of Mass Effect Andromeda. And after all that dust settled, now there is no more Mass Effect for the time being.

You can read more here: https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-t...

> ... so it's not as if diehard SW fans have a choice.

Why not boycott? I mean it would suck for the diehards for sure, but how long would they realistically have to wait? If EA misses 1 quarter's revenue goal, they'll be singing another tune.

I mean they don't have a choice in publisher unless they want to wait 2-3 years for a new deal by Disney to be signed. People do have a choice to wait to buy the game, of course -- I bought the first BattleFront when it went for sale for ~$10, which is about what it's worth. The risk of that is that multiplayer games have a certain shelf life -- generally you want to buy it when there's peak population, or at least when all of your friends are playing it. Waiting for a discount/out of protest results in greater risk of playing with a fractured player base.