"WoTC to Drop Star Wars" Topic

Wizards of the Coast announced that it will not be renewing the Star Wars license from Lucasfilm. This will cover both the RPG and the miniatures game.

link

Wyatt

Noted yesterday – TMP link – seems a weird business decision to me, but I suppose they've come to the conclusion that continuing would be throwing good money after bad.

Doug

Nooooooo, Lucas arts required all new products feature Jar Jar and even Hasbro choked on that.

I think its a TOTAL bummer. I really liked the Saga Edition rules.
nooooooooooooooo.com

That is bad news- WOTC generally did a good job with their Star Wars stuff. Sorry to see it go!

-Will

I have really enjoyed playing Saga Edition with my daughters. The last three books printed, and the upcoming one, still need to be added to my collection. How will this affect our gaming? Not one bit. Whether the game is in print or not, we can still play it and have hours of fun. The figures will be on the market for years to come from the collectibles sites, and since mostly we just use the Common ones anyways… yep, I think we will continue to be playing Saga Edition for a good long while yet :-)

Too bad about the clix. I have bought a load og them over the years. They have certainly revived Star Wars gaming.

Thanks,

John

Well if it's a matter of Lucas wanting too much for the license and WotC not bringing in enough money to write Mr. Lucas a check and still make a nice profit than I can see that.

However I'd wish that Hasbro take the Star Wars Miniatures rules and make a GI Joe based game on that. Hasbro owns the GI Joe license and thus can save a ton of money. There's enough characters and iterations of GI Joe figures out there that they can make enough sets to last a long time. Every 6-12 months they could release sets of figures representing the classic old 12" figures all the way through all the iterations of the GI Joe vs. Cobra range, the other obscure lines like the Sgt. Savaage and his Screaming Eagles and GI Joe Extreme, to even a line from the new movie. Every once in a while come out with a line of the big booster boxes that include things like vehicles in them and maybe a HUGE boxed set that includes a miniature playset like The PIT or the Terrordrome or something. There can be multiple factions, not just GI Joe and Cobra, but MARS, the Dreadnoks, The Oktober Guard, those Cobra-La mutants, and there were some space aliens I recall.

As much as I detest randomly packed prepainted minis, I see there is a demand for them and it seems to have worked well for WotC. Utilizing the GI Joe line is just something that the dunderheads on the board of Hasbro have been missing for years.

Guessing profit the license isn't what it used to be. I seem to recall Lucas demands are pretty steep. It would be nice to see the license picked up by serious gaming/miniatures company, but my previous comment suggests that even a major gaming company wouldn't be able to afford it.

Even I might be tempted by a decent figure line with models vehicles at a consistent scale, and I would love to see a decent fleet-scale line of starships.

Oh well. I was hoping that they would do "undead" Stormtroopers, and the various Star Wars-specific aliens from the Death Troopers novel. That would make a great game.
Andrew

I was hoping for a 15mm from wotc like their ww2 game. SW at that scale would have been AWESOME

Impala hits the nail on the head.

Heck, I still play the occasional game of West End SW.

I haven't play Star Wars RPG since the West End version. Didn't like WoTC's d20 rules.

So does this open the license to another party, or can we just write up and post Star Wars stats online for any game we want now?

And yet some company sees a market for Voltron in gaming.
What the hell is going on in the world today?

AAAAAAAAAA
I haven't even got ONE game played!

I think I sold all my West End stuff to some guy in Spain…

Maybe we can get some decently sculpted unpainted stuff now? I would kind of like to see GW pick up the license, so that the Perry Bros. could sculpt Star Wars in the same scale as their LotR stuff.

Like that would happen, Dunadan.
But its good to have dreams.

GW have Star Wars compete with their holy grail 40K?

No I don't see this happening either.
You'll shudder at the idea, but it opens Palladium Books back up to buy it as they tried to buy the license for it as an RPG years ago before they got the Robotech license.

"it opens Palladium Books back up to buy it"

There are few systems more ill-suited to representing Star Wars than D20. Palladium is one of them.

Frankly, I think that White Wolf's Exalted/Scion rules would be more suited to the genre than anything else, but White Wolf hasn't bought any licenses in at least the last 10 years.

I said it would make you shudder, but I heard years ago that Palladium did try to acquire Star Wars license.

Personally I liked WEG version but I'd rather play it in DP9's SilCore rules after WEG rules. But DP9 is too busy with it's work on Heavy Gear and plans to reboot Jovian Chronicles, then they have Gear Krieg and Core Command. I think they'd lack the capital or the will to want to add Star Wars to their rosters.

We still do the WEG version on a bi-weekly schedule. And do a WotC about once a month.

That's a pretty good idea, CmdrKiley. But if they didn't do a GI Joe miniature game for the release of the movie, I don't think they will. They don't have a movie release spur interest in the game. But I like the idea, and agree that they could have releases going for a long time with all the characters they have.