Last year, Disney acquired the assets Lucasfilm and LucasArts for $4.05Billion which looked to be a promising long-term conglomerate for the movie and video game franchise paired with one of the world’s top corporations; but earlier today, Game Informer obtained an official release statement from Disney announcing the closing of LucasArts.
“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
Over the past years, LucasArts has had non-success with the Star Wars video game franchise’s in releases such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Republic Heroes). Each of those titles had been well-recepted in the gaming community and major gaming publication by reviews; but never matched up with sales quotas. One of the titles we had been looking forward to was the first person shooter Star Wars 1313 (trailer after the jump) which left many jaws to the floor after its e3 2012 trailer reveal. A representative from LucasArts went on to say,
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“It’s super sad. It’s a terrible day. I want to make sure everyone realizes that there still will be Star Wars games out there.”
“It is worth noting that we are looking for proven external partners who can help us provide video games to our fans. We still believe in the video game industry, we still will provide Star Wars games, we’re just looking at different models rather than internal production… They’re evaluating everything. There’s always a possibility that it [Star Wars 1313] can still come out via licensing.”
This is good news to keep some hope alive for the title which we’re hoping Dominic Robilliard and LucasArts can find a home (shouldn’t be hard) for the Killer-App 1313 title.
[Source]