Disney acquired Lucasfilm back in October last year. Today it announced that it is pulling the plug on LucasArts, which was the game development arm of Lucasfilm. The studio says that it has decided to shift LucasArts from a development model to a licensing model. This ensures that the risk in brought down to a minimum, while licensing entails a broader portfolio of Star Wars titles from various developers it will be licensed to. What this basically means is that LucasArts will no longer be developing games internally. This move has resulted in an unspecified number of layoffs across the organization.
Disney also confirms that development of Star Wars 1313 is no longer under LucasArts, the future of this title is not certain at this point in time. LucasArts has been responsible for Star Wars titles as well as other video games such as Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island. Not known right now are the developers to which the Star Wars games will be licensed too. The last game that was released by LucasArts was a Kinect Star Wars title.