14 DAY TRIAL // Star Wars 1313 isn't going to be scrapped after the closure of LucasArts' development studio, as a representative has revealed that the title will be given to an external developer in order to finish it and launch it onto the market.
Disney surprised a lot of people yesterday when it confirmed that it was shutting down the development side of LucasArts in order to turn the company into a license-based publisher who'll only sell the rights for games based on Star Wars and other such properties to external developers.
While it seemed that ongoing projects like Star Wars 1313 were scrapped, it seems that at least the new title might still appear on the market.
According to a LucasArts representative who talked with GameInformer, the decision to transform the company was in the works ever since Disney bought parent company LucasFilm last year.
"All of these things happened at once. Naturally, as any company that goes through a big announcement like this, you have to look through your whole portfolio and realign some things. 1313 was looking fantastic, the reception has been great. Our other unannounced titles are fine, it just got to a point where from a business standpoint we couldn't continue developing those internally and keep up with the direction that the company was going."
Right now, LucasArts is looking for an external developer interested in continuing the work it did on the project.
"It is worth noting that we are looking for proven external partners who can help us provide video games to our fans. We still believe in the video game industry, we still will provide Star Wars games, we're just looking at different models rather than internal production... They're evaluating everything. There's always a possibility that it [Star Wars 1313] can still come out via licensing."
While it's definitely a sad day for LucasArts and Star Wars fans, the representative noted that new titles would still come out through licensing.