🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7/8/2017 6:13 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 08:38:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
> <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for the info.  Still a bit of a shame that all the non-SW
>> computer games LucasArts used to make got killed though.
> 
> Oh, definitely. I was looking forward to 1313, even given its already
> troubled history (apparently George "I like to meddle" Lucas was
> constantly demanding changes, not least of which was changing the
> protagonist to Boba "He sells toys" Fett ;-)
> 
> But its not unusual for games to die on the vine when publishers are
> closed or sold; it's far more unusual when they don't. Even
> incomplete, the assets have value (although I'm sure Disney would have
> allowed some other publisher to use them to finish the game /if/ that
> publisher paid a high-enough price for them). As importantly, Disney
> is aware of how a bad game can devalue the price of the license and
> may have kept the in-development games off-market because of that
> (games that jump development houses rarely do well). So maybe one day
> we'll see ideas first formulated for 1313 (or other in-development
> Star Wars projects) re-imagined in a new movie, comic, book or game.
> 
> LucasArts was closed in 2013; we're starting to get news of upcoming
> Star Wars games now. Four years really isn't that unusual a length of
> time given the necessity of forging licensing agreements,
> pre-development and then the actual authoring of a new triple-A title.
> It's not like the 80s when developers could whip out a game in three
> or six months; even were the workload less, just getting the budget
> and approval for a game from the corporate motherships (both from EA
> and Disney) probably took at least a year.
> 
House of Mouse was a little more drastic than stopping development of in 
progress games.  There was at least one game that was ready to ship that 
they killed.  I live in the area all the Lucas companies are based in so 
we were hearing a bit more detail than the news organizations were 
giving.  (Heck, back in the 80s I had a couple friends who worked for 
ILM.)  The day after the sale entire Lucas companies were given notice 
of termination.  Disney simply did not want anything that wasn't Star 
Wars movies, everything else was shut down immediately.  The speed with 
which they did so made it clear they had been planning this for a long 
time and knew exactly what they were doing.  Other stuff that is slowly 
being revived is because someone has been trying to convince The Mouse 
how stupid that was.


-- 
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation 
instinct are running screaming.