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Disney Shuts Down LucasArts, Cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault


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Disney has laid off the staff of LucasArts and cancelled all current projects.
Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio's current projects--Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313--were cancelled.
This comes after weeks and months of rumors involving the studio, which was acquired by Disney last fall. In September, LucasArts put a freeze on all hiring and product announcements, which many staff saw as the beginning of the end. Today, it's official: the longrunning studio is no more.
R.I.P
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The official statement reads as follows:

 

"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."
In some ways, the news is not a surprise. LucasArts had seemed directionless in recent years. The company's core business of games based on the Star Wars license have been largely disappointing in both quality and sales. While the company had some success with games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and the Battlefront series, both of those franchises seemed to have died on the vine. The cancellation of Star Wars Battlefront III was particularly ugly, which led to nasty public fingerpointing between LucasArts and developer Free Radical. The BioWare developed MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic (which was co-published with EA) won strong reviews but failed to maintain subscribers, and was eventually forced into instituting a free-to-play business model.
LucasArt's other big franchise, Indiana Jones, has failed to make much of a dent in games in recent years, with the exception of Traveller's Tales LEGO Indiana Jones series that, once again, was not developed by LucasArts. Meanwhile, series like Uncharted and Tomb Raider, which are both heavily influenced by the Indiana Jones films, have thrived.
More recently, LucasArts caused a stir at E3 2012 with an impressive looking demo for a new Star Wars project entitled Star Wars 1313. However, in the months that followed, the project seemed to lose steam, and rumors circulated that the game had ceased production.
The company seemed to have a revolving door of management. In 2004, LucasArts president Jim Ward led a massive restructuring of the company, laying off many development staffers in the process. Ward left in 2008, to be replaced by EA's Darrell Rodriguez, who lasted only two years at the head of the company. Rodriguez's position was ultimately filled by Epic Games' Paul Meegan, who then stepped down in 2012. The company was co-led by Kevin Parker and Gio Corsi until it was acquired by Disney.
During that time, LucasArts attempted to inject new life into its in-house development by bringing in respected industry vet Clint Hocking (who helped lead the Far Cry and Splinter Cell franchises at Ubisoft) in as its new creative director. Sadly, Hocking lasted only two years in the position and left without completing the game he had been working on.
The last game published by LucasArts as a company is the sub-par Kinect Star Wars.
Ironically, many of the games for which LucasArts is best remembered for are not Star Wars games. Its genre-defining '90s adventure games created by Ron Gilbert and DoubleFine's Tim Schafer like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango are all still celebrated by fans to this day.

 

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Lucas Representative says Star Wars 1313 might be saved.

 

"All of these things happened at once. Naturally, as any company that goes through a big announcement like this, you have to look through your whole portfolio and realign some things. 1313 was looking fantastic, the reception has been great. Our other unannounced titles are fine, it just got to a point where from a business standpoint we couldn't continue developing those internally and keep up with the direction that the company was going"

 

"It is worth noting that we are looking for proven external partners whocan 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"

 

"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"

 

source

 

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Star Wars 1313 looked good, atleast they have completed the project and waited for the reviews and sale response.

E3 announcement of Star wars 1313 made a hopeful well comeback and may had good response

 

I dunno why they made so fast decision and dissolved the entire company

Too bad Disney, Too bad

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Disney own the rights for Star Wars, so do they own comic rights too, or the comic rights belong to Dark Horse comics ?

they own everything related to star wars. other pubs can still make star wars games/toys/ etc but disney will get a cut of the profits and licensing fees without spending a penny on it.

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I really want Star Wars 1313 to be released.

 

It's dead. No matter what they say about trying to save it, it's not gonna happen.

 

1313 looked like Uncharted: Star Wars anyway. Why mourn the loss of one Uncharted clone when there are several others?

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