Yesterday, we received confirmation that LucasArts is officially no more. The studio was founded in 1982, and over the past three decades has produced some of gaming's most memorable titles.
Over 150 staff were laid off in the closure, and both Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, both very promising games, have been shelved indefinitely.
So what happened? How could such a historic studio just disappear overnight? While it may feel sudden, the truth of the matter is that this has been a long time coming. It really only took the shake up from the Disney acquisition for the studio to finally go under.
The signs of the end began in 2002, when LucasArts publicly recognized that its over-reliance on Star Wars games had negatively affected the studio's level of quality. To that end, the studio promised that all of its future releases would be half Star Wars, half non-Star Wars related games. It was a sound strategy, but one that the company did not seem intent on committing to. Most of these original IPs were cancelled before release, and the ones that did make it to stores struggled to find an audience.
2003 breathed some life back into the company, bringing Knights of the Old Republic, one of the studio's biggest modern hits and considered by many fans to be one of the best uses of the Star Wars license to date. Unfortunately, this success was marred a year later when LucasArts forced the developer, Obsidian Entertainment, to release the game in an incomplete state. This was further compounded by the failing luck of Star Wars Galaxies, the company's first MMORPG, which by 2006 was seeing its players leaving in droves.
By 2010, the company was experiencing significant layoffs and departures, including president Darrell Rodriguez and Haden Blackman, creative director on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the studio's most profitable internally produced title.
In recent years, LucasArts has been staying afloat on the sales of games like LEGO Star Wars and Kinect Star Wars, neither of which have garnered the studio much name brand value with the core demographic of gamers. LucasArts gave one last run at a high profile title in 2012 with The Old Republic, an MMO set in the timeline of Knight of the Old Republic. While it had a significant amount of buzz going into the launch, the subscriber base fell so rapidly that the game was converted to a free-to-play in a matter of months.
All in all, the closure of LucasArts is hardly surprising. Disney is looking to shore up their new found assets, and are cutting a division that has proven to be a profit sinkhole in recent years. LucasArts will always be remembered for its better moments, whether it be KotOR or their "golden age" of adventure games in the 90s. But it should also be a reminder to other studios of the need to iterate, innovate, and take risks. LucasArts's reliance on the Star Wars name proved to be their downfall, and if a studio like that can go down, no one is particularly safe.