100 are said to have lost their jobs at the George Lucas games studio
According to reports on the web this morning there has been a number of layoffs at LucasArts, with up to 100 jobs lost as the firm looks to make sure much of its games development is handled out of house.
Posts on Kotaku claim that Lucas staff given their marching orders say roles across the board, from QA to production, have been lost as the company looks towards outsourcing games development.
Kotaku also says that Peter Hirschmann, VP of product development, has left the company.
Insiders now claim LucasArts is too under-staffed to manage the packed product slate it is rumoured to be preparing - including more Lego titles, and multiple new Star Wars games including new Knights of the Old Republic and Battlefront games.
Many of these games were already handled by external teams - such as Traveller's Tales (Lego), or the many independents it used to make Battlefront spin-offs, such as Rebellion. Other games, like a new Star Wars Clone Wars game, were already confirmed to be in development by LucasArts' new games development and animation studio in Singapore. Meanwhile Fracture, a non-Lucas IP based title being published by the firm, is in development not at LucasArts but at US independent Day 1.
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It sounds most likely that internally-made games, such as the upcoming Indiana Jones title, could bear the biggest brunt of the layoffs. The studio's next game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, is reportedly mostly done and won't be affected by the layoffs.
LucasArts has seen some management changes of late. Former president Jim Ward stepped down in February - a departure rumoured to be related to a rift with other execs over his decision to postpone upcoming LucasArts games for quality reasons - replaced by former EA LA COO Darrell Rodriguez a few months later.
LucasArts has walked a fairly rocky road in games development - after a boom period in the '80s and '90s, it effectively had to start from scratch after firing virtually all its development staff in 2004. Since then it had to rebuild its development teams, working with sister company Industrial Light and Magic on a much-vaunted and promoted art and tools pipeline shared between development teams and movie special effect workshops.
Just wanted to add some commentary to this story - nothing contradicting the above, more a reply to the bogus information put out by 'analyst' Michael Pachter that this is to do with industry 'politics'.
You can see his claims on Kotaku. I'd post there but I'm not a registered member.
Anyway, his claims are just that, bogus. As a developer close to the company, the claims that this latest development has to do with 'politics' are inaccurate guesswork.
Fact is, LucasArts has gone through some project changes internally for a while. Last year the decision was made to fast-track Force Unleashed and put new Indy sort of on hold until after Crystal Skull was done. The thinking being that the Indy property can 'return' properly as film - dispelling the claim that next-gen Indy is the 'fourth film - which would inspire a new series of games, which starts with Lego Indy, then the new Crystal Skull game being developed by AM2 in Canada, then the big next-gen Indy next year.
But in the mean time the company has effectively become a one-development-team studio. The layoffs make that official, and the fact that QA will be outsourced isn't a surprise - loads of studios already do that. I work at one such company.
That's only stuff people at the company/with friends there will know, though.
My biggest problem with Pacther's comments is his comprehensive lack of knowledge about the Lego licence and Hollywood politics and Traveller's Tales. Kotaku's report says "It would be highly unlikely, said Pachter, that WB would allow Traveller's to work on future Indiana Jones games when rival studio Paramount (Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull) would reap the benefits."
But LucasArts is going to produce another Lego Indy game. It's a given. Heck, more Lego Star Wars games are a given if they can think up a justification for it. And the Lego half of that licence is exclusively owned by Traveller's Tales, so there's no way that Warner's ownership of TT will have had an effect on the decision - they'll HAVE to work together for the Lego series to continue.
Pacther's comments irritate me as they ignore these very facts.
What also irritates me is the size of this text input box - Develop dudes, it's not that hard to code this to be a little bit bigger and easy to use.
