No doubt you've heard the dramatic news around the internet by now; Lucasarts has gone through with a massive staff layoff, and not surprisingly, most of its former staff are not happy.

Source tell us that the sackings are spread across the board, and involve everything and anything from testers to artists producers. The number of affected staff appears to be around the 100 mark.

Apparently, the recent layoffs leave the company severely short-staffed as the company approach a packed development schedule, which looks like it may become increasingly outsourced. Some of the titles the staff has reported Lucasarts have in this stacked pipeline, be it as publisher or developer, include:

- KOTOR 3 (An MMORPG, as previously rumoured)
- Battlefront 3
- "The Official Indiana Jones" game
- "another LEGO game based on the Indy universe"
- "a lightsaber game for the wii"

Two internally-developed games seem to far enough along to be unaffected by the staff culling; The Force Unleashed and Fracture, although the latter appears to have been described by it disgruntled team members as "an absolute piece of garbage".

Take that as you will.

Tags : Battlefront 3 : Fracture : Indiana Jones : Knights of The Old Republic : Knights of the Old Republic 3 : KotOR : KotOR 3 : layoffs : Lego Indiana Jones : Lucasarts : pc : PlayStation 3 : The Force Unleased : The Official Indiana Jones : Wii : Wii Lightsaber : Xbox 360

Comments

By: Evren On: 08:34 Jun 6th, 2008 Offline	Wow, when a member of the team says it crap...holy hell. But then again, if they dont like it, whats the point in continuing the project, start again, sure, the publishers will be pissed, but I think they'd be even more pissed over the fact the game sucks.

By: Corrine On: 01:36 Jun 6th, 2008 Offline	You should probably change "layout" to "layoffs" the few times you have it written here, especially in the title. A news story would make less sense if you're missing a key word. I would change it for you but apparently I'm not an editor any more.

By: Dragonsoul On: 06:56 Jun 7th, 2008 Offline	I can understand employees being upset at losing their livelihood as I have been through a few layoffs myself (thankfully never a victim of one). I didn't follow the details on this, but it sure sounds like a case of bad planning here...