Lucasarts Shuttered, Employees Laid Off

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LucasartsKotaku is reporting that Disney has officially shut down Lucasarts and laid off all employees.

Given the lingering hard feelings over Lucasfilm Animation and the cancellation of The Clone Wars, it’s easy to get upset at Disney. I would caution against it, however. Lucasarts was a development studio that was in trouble years before Disney even came into the picture. The number of titles they released plummeted around 2006-2007 and the marquee titles they did release were not well received critically. The Force Unleashed and its sequel were regarded as middling titles and The Old Republic was a huge expenditure that failed to put a dent in the MMO market.

There’s also this to consider:

Lucasarts has been a development studio in trouble for years. This studio getting shut down doesn’t mean the end of Star Wars games. If anything, I view it as a hopeful thing. For whatever reason, they have been unable to produce quality products internally for a number of years and they probably could have and should have been closed down sooner to redistribute that valuable IP.

If Disney is licensing the Star Wars IP now to other studios, that could be great news for fans.

Edit: Official statement from Lucasfilm

GameInformer received a statement from Lucasfilm discussing the closure of the studio.

“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 addition, Kotaku is now reporting that Star Wars 1313 and First Assault have been canceled

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. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.