Disney kills Star Wars 1313 and dismisses employees of LucasArts

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LucasArts report that they stopped the development of Star Wars 1313 and other projects, they fire employees.

That's the end of a fairy tale: Lucasfilm announced that it is stopping the internal development of games at LucasArts, which can be considered the consequences of the acquisition of Disney in November 2012.
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“After evaluating our position in the gaming market, we decided to shift the focus of LucasArts from internal development towards the licensing model, which will reduce the company's risks while expanding the portfolio of quality games in the Star Wars universe,” says Lucasfilm. - "As a result of such changes, we made a number of reductions for the company."

A Lucasfilm spokesperson told Wired that the internal development of announced games, such as the next-generation shooter Star Wars 1313 , was stopped, but the company is considering the possibility of developing these projects by third-party developers. At the same time, Kotaku.com quotes an anonymous source within the company, which reports that such opportunities have already been investigated , and Disney could not find contractors for these projects. Apparently, there is little chance that 1313 will ever be released.

Despite Disney's messages when acquiring a "star" company, that the focus will be shifted more towards mobile than console development, representatives of Lucasfilm assured Wired that future Star Wars console games have not yet been discounted.

Current events could well have been expected, given that Disney had clearly expressed their intentions during the acquisition of the company. Disney clearly showed its position of consistently abandoning the internal development of console games when they closed Warren Spector's Junction Point studio (responsible for the release of Epic Mickey 2 ), and are moving towards social and mobile platforms. Console titles Disney and Star Wars still do not disappear, but will be developed by third-party studios.

In fact, Lucasfilm has been engaged in survival and all sorts of fixes of LucasArts for many years, in particular, with constant mess with creative and executive directors. I can understand why Lucas as an independent company may need to retain his own gaming unit by any means. However, Disney has no such need. They already have a game development unit, and they have no need to solve the problems of LucasArts. It is terrible when hundreds of people lose their jobs, but organizations that lose competitiveness must be ready to “die” in order to make room for better and stronger competitors. And nobody cares if Star Wars games cannot be released by external developers.

However, if you are nostalgic for good old Lucas games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion , there is good news for you. First, the developers of these games are currently already actively engaged in projects of companies such as Telltale or Double Fine, creating exactly what you would like Lucas to continue creating. If you're craving a new Grim Fandango , then moving to a licensing model makes it more likely that Disney will want to cash in on such demand.

Those LucasArts, for which you probably feel nostalgic, died a long time ago, when the company canceled the sequel to Sam & Max and dismissed the entire team. And at the same time, this same team formed the Telltale Games and ultimately issued The Walking Dead to the surface . The LucasArts that died today is not at all what you once knew, and would never have become so.