Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
One of the great video game developers has fallen. Yesterday Disney made the announcement that they were shutting down LucasArts, effective immediately. Disney had acquired the studio last year when they bought LucasFilm from George Lucas back in October. One hundred and fifty people have lost their jobs with this closure.
With the closure of the studio comes the cancellation of Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault. Because Disney is moving to a licensing model for games it’s technically possible for those games to be licensed off to a different publisher or developer, but according to Kotaku that’s not likely to happen. That’s really quite disappointing, because 1313 was looking pretty good when it was unveiled at E3 last year.
While the closing of LucasArts is a bit tragic, it’s not too surprising. When Disney acquired it last year CEO Robert Iger had stated that they were looking into licensing rather than publishing. Not only that, but over the last few months there had been murmurings of a freeze in hiring. Really though, if I had to guess as to why the studio stayed open as long as it did since its acquisition, I’d have to say that Disney wanted to see how far along LucasArts was withthose two games, and see if it would be worth spending the money to finish developing them or not. Apparently, if that’s what they were doing, that answer was a resounding “no”.
