Was Lucas Arts Shutting Down Really a Surprise?

It's been a a little over a week since the announcement hit that Lucas Arts had been axed by Disney. While it is always sad to see another development company go and for people to lose their jobs, was this completely unreasonable? The in-house development team at Lucas Arts hasn't exactly been very productive and the more memorable Star Wars games from the 2000's have been externally developed. Most people miss Lucas Arts for the adventure games they used to develop. Ask most people what recent Lucas Arts developed series/franchise they'll miss and they will more than likely just respond with a blank stare.

Let's look at Lucas Arts' recent track record. Back in 2009, Lucas Arts developed a 2D platformer/puzzle game by the name of Lucidity for PC and XBLA. It would seem like Lucas Arts attempted to branch out and make something other than Star Wars games, but this title received average review scores and sits at a 62% on Metacritic. Prior to Lucidity, Lucas Arts had also developed The Force Unleashed series in 2008/10 and, while the first game was a financial and critical success, the game's rushed sequel all but guaranteed no one would want to see more of Starkiller and friends.

In 2005, the Lucas Arts developed Republic Commando was released and received favorable review scores all around. Even to this day it has quite a cult following of fans begging for a sequel. Going back to 2003, Lucas Arts released two internally developed titles: Gladius and RTX Red Rock. The latter was a Scifi action-adventure game that received mediocre reviews while Gladius was an RPG focused around gladiators that was given good review scores and was stated to be very underrated. From 2001 and back we see a few Star Wars movie tie-in games, a bunch of Indiana Jones titles, as well as the adventure games that made Lucas Arts so well loved to begin with.

Looking back on Lucas Arts' development history, one can see that they were quite active in developing titles up until the early 2000's. After a lackluster number of sales in 2003, Lucas Arts underwent restructuring that saw the studio's development team drop from 450 to 190 employees. Lucas Arts wanted to put a focus on internally developing games and put an effort on efficiency; a “quality over quantity” business model. This move was fairly hit or miss, as laid out above, and resulted in Lucas Arts also mistreating the third party developers that they licensed games out to.

A month before Force Unleashed 2 was scheduled to be released, the internal development team was hit more with down scaling. The next few years were rough for Lucas Arts as the company saw its most prominent figures leaving the company and 2010 saw even more layoffs hit the studio. With the rather poor reception of recent Lucas Arts franchises and the complete lack of internally developed games, is it really any surprise that Disney would choose to only license out the Lucas Arts IPs? As I said before, it is always terrible to see people lose their job and another studio close down, but the evidence was there that this would have been inevitable if 1313 had not been a success prior to the Disney acquisition.

So, what happens to the titles Lucas Arts had been planning on developing? Well, we know 1313 is still being shown around with the possibility of another studio picking up the project, but Disney is apparently not very confident this will occur. First Assault is, more than likely, going to remain an unfinished project, but perhaps the biggest tragedy from all of this is Battlefront 3. According to an article over on Kotaku, Lucas Arts had made the decision to resuscitate the series after it had been passed around several studios and just finish the project themselves. With Lucas Arts shutting down; however, that project has been shut down as well. If there was ever any hope to see Battlefront 3, those dreams have been all but crushed by Disney's decision.

Once more, gaze upon what could have been and cry.