LucasArts
was founded in 1982, by filmmaker George Lucas and has been responsible for
some of the most memorable video games of all time, including The Secret of Monkey
Island, Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Battlefront, among countless others
over the last 30 years it has been in business, but now everything has changed.
After the sale of its parent company (LucasFilm) to Disney, Kotaku reports that
Disney has already fired 150 workers from LucasArts and that it is not going through
with the production of two of the most anticipated games to come from
LucasArts, Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault. For now nothing on both
these projects is known.
According
to IGN, the studio is going to stop developing games; they are instead going to
license their titles to other companies.
"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," a LucasArts spokesperson
told IGN. "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."
On
a personal note, I can understand the corporate move being made, its cost effective,
it’s a win win situation. They cash in when they sell their titles to other
studios and they cash in when the games start to sell. That being said it’s a horrible
thing to do, firing 150 people, especially with this economy it’s a death sentence
to a lot of people. Let’s see if Lucas has anything to say to this atrocious decision?
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