The Battlefront 3 rumor comes from a magazine column that already called two big shots

Two of the claims in Electronic Gaming Monthly’s revived gossip column have already checked out this year. Bill Skarsgård joined Hideo Kojima’s Physint just as Xbox picked the game up from Sony. Diablo 4 landed on the Switch 2. The column’s third claim is the one gaming media spent this week repeating: that Lucasfilm is hunting for a studio to build Star Wars Battlefront 3, with EA DICE the frontrunner and Bungie the wild card. Two have cleared. One hasn’t. Both hits were confirmed in September; the issue reached backers on October 9.

EGM had not printed an issue since 2014. Issue 265 exists because the EGM Compendium Kickstarter cleared a $250,000 stretch goal in 2024. It went on to raise more than $1.7 million, and backers received the issue on October 9. Quartermann is the magazine’s old pseudonymous rumor column. The pen name once belonged to EGM’s news editor. Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, who contributed to the issue, read the Battlefront passage on his Game Mess Mornings podcast on October 19. Who actually wrote this particular item, even Grubb does not seem to know.

The Skarsgård casting is the stronger of the two hits. Kojima confirmed it himself at the Xbox Tokyo Game Show broadcast on September 17: “I’m delighted to confirm the lead role for PHYSINT will be Bill Skarsgård.” The Xbox half of the prediction matters as much as the casting. Sony had withdrawn from the project in mid-June. Kojima Productions spent the summer finding a new publisher before Microsoft stepped in. The column carried both pieces, the casting and the publisher move, before either was public.

Diablo is the more conventional prediction of the two. Everyone assumed this port was coming. Blizzard confirmed the Switch 2 version at BlizzCon 2026 and shipped the Diablo IV: Age of Hatred Collection on September 15 for $69.99, base game plus both expansions. The port was the easy call. A soft prediction, but a cleared one, and it means the column’s sources were right about two different publishers’ unannounced plans in the same season.

True Achievements, the outlet that flagged the column’s record, adds one complication the forensic read has to carry: the column “appears to have been written some time ago.” By the time backers got the issue on October 9, both predictions had already landed. That does not erase the hits. The column still had both stories before the confirmations. But the confirmations arrived after the column was written and before the issue shipped. What the record proves is that the column’s sources were plugged in. The column was written before the confirmations. It shipped after them.

The column says Disney “has big plans for the Star Wars Battlefront series.” Lucasfilm has been “aggressively deploying probe droids” for a development partner. “No one has fully stepped up.” Two studios are “circling the project like a couple of snowspeeders,” the expected EA DICE, which the column hopes “learned from their loot box lesson,” and then the wink: “There is another. The Quartermann hears that if the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and Marathon developer Bungie.”

Grubb, reading it on his own podcast, immediately separated the claim from what it implies. It “doesn’t sound like the game is in the works yet,” he said. Only that conversations about who should take it on appear to be happening. His verdict was blunt. “I don’t think they’re going to make Star Wars Battlefront 3. I think it’ll go to DICE.” He allowed, though, that Bungie’s gunplay “would feel fantastic.” And he called the broader idea encouraging. After nine years, “it’s time to make another one.”

The column’s version has company. The company disagrees with it. Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer posted on X on October 19: “DICE and from what I’ve heard Respawn are working on Battlefront 3. Not sure what that means for Battlefield.” That describes a project already staffed, not a search for a partner. The creator Battlefront Updates has close ties to EA and DICE. He said on X that “real discussions are happening.” He called the project “very very early,” which lands closer to the column. Mats Helge Holm, a developer on the 2017 game, said many former colleagues want to return for a new entry. So Brammer has the game staffed, Battlefront Updates has it at “very very early,” and the column has it still searching for a partner.

Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in 2022. The numbers since then explain why a Sony-owned studio making a Disney game is the strangest line in the file. Sony has taken write-downs of about $767 million on Bungie across two quarters. In June it cut roughly half the studio: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported about 400 of 800 remaining staff, with 292 named in the Washington WARN filing. Destiny 2 received its final content update on June 9. Marathon, the extraction shooter meant to be Bungie’s second act, launched March 5, peaked at 88,337 concurrent Steam players, and was under 1,000 by July after selling about 1.2 million copies. A studio in triage taking on the industry’s most scrutinized shooter license reads as desperation on paper. It is also the one kind of project that hands a wounded studio a guaranteed audience. Sony’s studio chief Hermen Hulst has said Marathon remains “an important part of our portfolio” and mentioned “incubation efforts for future projects,” without naming any.

EA’s exclusive Star Wars deal, signed in 2013 when Disney shuttered LucasArts, ended in 2023, and that is the market reason Lucasfilm would even be shopping. The exclusive decade produced four major games against a stack of cancellations: Visceral’s Project Ragtag, and this year the unannounced Star Wars FPS from Respawn that EA killed to focus on its owned brands. The post-exclusivity slate is the proof of concept the column’s claim needs. Bit Reactor’s Zero Company sold more than a million copies in its first month in August. Fuse Games’ Galactic Racer topped Steam’s best-sellers this month. Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly has said the company wants to work with large and small studios alike, and that it will “continue to surprise folks.”

Battlefront II, nine years after a launch that became the industry’s cautionary tale about loot boxes, set a record of 35,892 concurrent Steam players in June 2025. That is the column’s own argument: the game’s “sustained popularity” is why Disney wants a sequel. The fans are running their own forensics in the GamingLeaksAndRumours thread. One user wrote that they “refuse to get my hopes up, but this report seems like it may just have some teeth into it.” Another wants Respawn “to work on a game with 3 in the title but it’s not Battlefront.”

As of Friday, Lucasfilm, EA, DICE, Bungie and Respawn have not commented on any of it. The column’s sources are real, the claim is unconfirmed, and the accounts around it disagree on the basics. Whether anyone is even searching is disputed. The issue went to Kickstarter backers on October 9. Nothing has been confirmed since.