LucasArts Shut Down, Staff Laid Off

Back in October, Disney purchased LucasFilm and, by extension, LucasArts. While LucasArts haven’t been that popular a studio for some time now, they still have a long history of making great games, especially adventure games. Plus, they had Star Wars 1313 on the horizon, and that looked awesome. But their new Disney overlords decided LucasArts wasn’t worth the money or something.

Last week Disney announced that they were shutting down the studio and laying off the 150 some staff members that worked there. The two games the studio was working at the time of shut down, Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, have both been cancelled.

Disney said that both of these games could still exist by licensing them other devs or publishers, but a source at Kotaku says this probably isn’t going to happen.

LucasFilm, the parent company of LucasArts, released the following statement about the closure…

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.

I wasn’t really in the gaming scene during LucasArts’ heyday and their recent games haven’t been stellar, it’s still sad to hear about a studio with such a history to it being shut down. Hopefully the former LucasArts staff will be able to find jobs with other studios. Best of luck to them all.