Today marks the end of an era in gaming, as Disney has shut down LucasArts. The venerable studio, which first opened in 1982, is responsible for not only the Star Wars games, but also such classics as Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle.
LucasArts will no longer be developing games internally, instead switching to a licensing model. The studio’s current projects, however, including Star Wars: First Assault and the promising Star Wars 1313 have been canceled, with “essentially zero” hope of them being licensed out to other developers.
The company was sold to Disney as part of the merger between Disney and Lucasfilm last year. Since then, the developer’s future has been on the ropes, with freezes on hiring and announcements of new products in recent months.
Losing such an iconic game studio is always difficult, but even moreso for the people directly involved, who are no longer employed and must find new work. Our thoughts go out to all of those people affected and we hope they find new studios to put their talents to use.
Source: Game Informer
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This… is sad, and I hope that everyone affected makes it out okay. To be honest though, I can’t say I ever played any of the LucasArts-developed games. I loved Battlefront 2, but that was by a different development team, if I remember correctly. I know The Force Unleashed is supposedly good, but I have yet to try it. Maybe this’ll give me a reason to get around to it.
I’m not that bothered by this. Honestly, what has really come out of them in the last couple of years? Licensed LEGO games and some Clone Wars stuff. They were great in the ’90s as developers. But recently (let’s say… 2000+), most of their good output was merely published by LucasArts – not developed. And that seems to be what Disney is doing. They said LucasArts will be around for licensing, so that to me says publisher. So, hopefully they continue to hand out licenses to some good developers.
They may have had some interesting titles in development, but we don’t really know anything about them to determine that.
From what I understand, the only games they were really working on were Star Wars 1313 (Which apparently focused on Boba Fett), and Star Wars: First Assault, an XBLA/PSN game.