http://kotaku.com/5013987/lucasarts-conf...ll-healthy
So read every morsel of this information meal and tell me how this can possibly be good news. They replaced the COO (which sounds like another word by the way, one used in a military sense) with someone from EA? Oh great... and right afterwards, roughly 75 employees are laid off, many of which seem to have left "mutually" saying there is a "difference in philosophy" involved?
Yeah, now I worry about their future prospects.
Lucasarts hasn't done much of anything good worth mentioning since 1999. :(
Yeah, Lucasarts is falling apart. But I haven't really cared that much for the company since they stopped making adventure games.
And space sims and FPSes (done by LUCASARTS, not external companies)! Don't forget those! Their adventure games were spectacular and were their top titles, but weren't their only great games.
It is pretty sad to see some of this great old companies pretty much becoming shells of themselves, or even falling apart altogether. It's tough for smaller studios to survive in the industry today with all the money that it costs to make games. Hopefully Live Arcade and WiiWare will help smaller developers make it, or former great companies stay alive without getting bought out by a larger company.
It is really sad to see the same fate befall Lucasarts that happened to Sierra all those years ago. The details are different, but the result is the same. I mean they got rid of the people behind Grim Fandango? What's wrong with them?
All we have left now is The Adventure Company, which is really more of a publishing house for other game companies (in other words, it ranges from brilliance like Syberia to utterly terrible titles that are barely coded enough to work).
Lucasarts fired a third of its staff, including most of the Force Unleashed 2 team, immediately upon completion of the game. Yes, again, just like with the first one.
It makes one think that maybe delaying a game for over a decade is a good long term strategy to keep one's job.