Sad new for Lucasfilm, as the company laid off all of its game development and support staff, and suspended work on Star Wars 1313, and Star Wars: First Assault.
Many are pointing at Disney as the big bad in all of this, as the company has also announced the cancellation of Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series. This may be true, but according to the prepared statement from Lucasfilm, “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.”
Lots of interesting words in that statement, but I can understand the parent company’s stance on the ability to license the Star Wars property to other game developers. At the very least it opens up the possibility that Blizzard (the makers of StarCraft and World of Warcraft) might license Star Wars to create an incredibly successful MMORPG.
Though i don’t play video games like I used to, I was looking forward to Star Wars 1313 to see how it expanded the universe as it expanded on the underbelly of the SWU.
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“Many are pointing at Disney as the big bad in all of this, as the company has also announced the cancellation of Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series.”
I thought it was just cancelled on CN, with new content to be released elsewhere (probably online)?
Looks like its done outright. Early speculation had it moving to Disney XD but is seems like they’re finished with it for now.
It sort of makes sense they would be clearing the decks for a new Star Wars property anyway. For the most part, producers are careful to not have multiple iterations of the same I/P running concurrently.
And really 5 seasons is a pretty impressive run by any standard for an animated show. Still I’ll miss it. And they did a creditable job with the Ahsoka Tano character arc. I can live with her riding off into the sunset. It neatly avoids an Order 66 fate and maybe sets her up for continuing adventures as an apocryphal Grey Jedi.
The Disney XD speculation was said to be false the same day they announced the cancellation on CN and said future stories would be shown elsewhere TBD.