That was what my consideration about budget came from.
There are plenty of software houses that do niche genres, hell, if some stupidly convoluted **** like X can sell enough to keep Egosoft afloat as long as they don't make another blunder like Rebirth you can bet a tighter single player spacesim with the Star Wars license on the same budget with good gamepad and m+k support can undoubtedly do well.
I'd probably concur if we were talking about Freespace 3 or Wing Commander VI, but it's Star Wars: the promise alone of the "blowing up Tie Fighters in an X-wing cockpit" experience will be appealing to people, trouble is that you can't make it a triple A title that needs to sell 7.000.000 copies just to get even and EA is one of those big name publishers won't publish a middle or low budget title anymore.
I mean, we have game like Legend of Grimrock, that is a grid-based real time dungeon crawler RPG, that stuff was niche even when it was cool for crying out loud! Nothing forbids EA to try a similar low or middle budget project with a Star Wars spacesim.
I don't think the market is there for the type of game we played decades ago. From my understanding flight sims have gone one of two ways, they've either gotten arcadey or they've got super realistic. Way back in the day when I was a little kid I had a blast shooting down guys in Aces over Europe and Aces of the Pacific, fast-forward to a few years ago and I couldn't even get off the ground in IL-2 Sturmovik. And when I was off the ground, I chased a guy for half an hour and didn't down him. You know when the game suggests you learn by attacking friendly bombers that it's not for casuals. So is there a market for light sims? From what I heard, X-Wing Alliance sold like 143K copies in the US over the course of a year which is absolutely pitiful numbers.
The other thing about modern sci-fi flight games is that most of them are open world faff-abouts. Driving a ship from one dock to the next, changing credit numbers into cargo numbers so you can go somewhere else and change those cargo numbers into a bigger number of credit numbers until the number in your bank account matches the number of the new gizmo/ship you want. Rinse repeat.
So that said, any starfighter game would probably either be arcade-y, or, you flying a YT-1300 from place to place. Not really X-Wing material.
EVE Valkyrie has bad reviews. Starlight Inception I backed and quit after 3 minutes. Strike Suit Zero is a fun romp but arcade-y. Maybe there are more games out there but I daresay your only hope for a single player game might be Squadron 42. And given that their hour of gameplay looked like a walking simulator, I wouldn't cross your fingers.
But as for EA could they make an X-Wing simulator? Sure. But would they? Nope. Best you could hope for is arcade-style like what's already in Battlefront II. In fact you'd probably have the exact same mechanics, just with a star-fighter only campaign. And whether that's down to EA, or it's down to EA's contract with Disney, who knows.
In other news though, GOG just released Star Wars pod-racer few weeks back. Let's see if it's as fun as I remember the demo being.