Awhile ago, we reported that Lucasarts President Jim Wards stepped down from his post due to personal reasons. We are now getting reports that GameSetWatch, via Gamasutra, has an anonymous comment made that may help clear up the reasons as reactions to the resignation of Ward. It’s as follows:

“Whether Jim Ward resigned or was asked to leave is up in the air. However, one thing is clear and that is Mich (& company) was unhappy with his delaying of the Force Unleashed and Indiana Jones titles. They also didn’t trust his numbers for increasing expected sales as a basis for delaying the game.

Additionally, LucasArts is a “young company” in the fact that it fired every engineer save four in 2004. So they’ve had to rebuild from scratch - including a substandard engine. This is where Jim comes in, rebuilding the company from the ground up.

Now the head of licensing (Howard Roffman) is now interim president for Lucas Arts and this could spell trouble for the LucasArts division. There are some that believe that more money can be made by licensing the SW and Indiana Jones IP to third party developers than through in-house development. Whether Mr. Roffman’s taking over the reigns of LucasArts represents such a shift will be only be revealed in time.

But one thing is for sure, Jim Ward was in a no win situation from the start, trying to meet unrealistic expectations - young team and some of the worst tools in the industry to work with.

It’s just a post, and has no official merit, but it’s interesting, none the less. Any official information on the stepping down of LA president Jim Ward will be placed on EUC as soon as we get it. We respect that he stepped down for “personal reasons.”

Source: GameSetWatch

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Video Game News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.