LucasArts, according to various sources and feature stories written over their lifespan, exemplified Executive Meddling, with a laundry list of scrapped, mismanaged and unfinished games under their watch. The actions of the studio culminated in Disney gutting it after their acquisition of the Star Wars license in 2013, and it solely exists these days as a licensor for other products, having moved completely out of in-house production.
- Fracture suffered from various Executive Meddling from LucasArts, such as a lack of creative control, being forced to change the game from a first-person shooter to a third-person shooter (which caused a lot of technical problems), and George Lucas coming in to force some more changes such as a request to change the main protagonist's name from Mason Briggs to Jet Brody (despite marketing already naming him the former). As a result of the game selling poorly, LucasArts cut all of its ties with Day 1 Studios, leaving Day 1 seeking a new publisher to stay afloat.
- Force Commander was rebooted three times. The first iteration looked heavily like Command & Conquer before it was scrapped and turned into full 3D. After some delays, it was released in a buggy state with subpar graphics, bad controls, and camera issues.
- LucasArts' fall from grace and eventual dissolution has been covered in multiple feature stories
, and showed a company that was equal parts mismanaged and directionless. According to various sources, promising projects like Star Wars 1313 and the multiplayer shooter Star Wars: First Assault were prone to delays and shifts mid-development because of severe mismanagement that some developers felt bordered on sabotage. A hiring freeze in late 2012 killed LucasArts' momentum, and planned marketing initiatives for the in-house projects were shunted to the sidelines. A month later, the studio was shut down due to Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm, and the in-development projects were all canceled.- Many sources blamed the studio's former president, Micheline Chau, for causing strife and distrust between the various staffers by forcing them to rehearse what they would say to Lucas and not give any unscripted feedback of their own. If George Lucas ever chimed in on a project, his word was considered divine mandate; developers were not allowed to argue against or even question his decisions, which was problematic as staffers alleged that Lucas would give them bizarre or confusing design requests. His alleged meddling included cancelling a Chewbacca-focused action game because Lucas didn't consider Chewbacca as a protagonist, contributing to the cancellation of a Darth Maul game by telling the team to make it a "buddy cop story" with Darth Talon (a character that wouldn't exist in-universe for at least 100 years later), and wanting the protagonist of The Force Unleashed to be named Darth Icky... which the developers got around by naming him Starkiller, a name used in development for the original Star Wars film for the character that became Luke Skywalker, and therefore technically a name suggested by Lucas.
- Coupling with What Could Have Been, LucasArts' dissolution caused many promising projects to be scrapped in mid-development. These scrapped games included (in addition to 1313 and First Assault) a complex open-world game designed by Far Cry 2 developer Clint Hocking, a proposed third installment of Knights of the Old Republic by Obsidian Entertainment, a third installment of The Force Unleashed, an Updated Re-release of the Rogue Squadron series and more. They were also several completed projects, including a mobile game where you could control the Death Star and another mobile game called Outpost where the player could create their own Empire, that were completed but scrapped for no discernible reason.
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is legendary for its turbulent development history and botched release.
- Obsidian Entertainment, having just formed from the ashes of Black Isle Studios, was just getting together and didn't even have an office yet. They set up in Feargus Urquhart's attic, and when someone turned on the microwave, the fuses would blow up and computers would go down. Also, the team of rookies was small and had to learn how to work with the new Odyssey Engine.
- Due to delays from LucasArts, Obsidian didn't have access to the original game until relatively late into production, when Knights of the Old Republic was released, which wasted a lot of time and forced them to scramble. The team had been actually forced to blindly pitch several ideas without knowing the previous game's plot beyond a simple description, which resulted in Avellone being forced to scrap basically everything from his first version.
- According to Feargus Urquhart, they originally signed for a short development cycle, but after hitting a few milestones, LucasArts was pleasantly surprised with the rookie studio's work and decided to give Obsidian a few months of extension to complete the game... except they forgot to formally amend the contract, leaving this as a mere verbal agreement. Inevitably, after LucasArts experienced some financial difficulties in 2004, they changed their minds and said the game would be released earlier as originally planned, and Obsidian found itself suddenly running against the clock. Avellone and the rest of the studio have admitted they made a mistake by not trying to fight for more time as it had been originally stipulated.
- With time running out, Obsidian had to abandon many of their most ambitious plans for the game and cut a lot of content, leading to aborted arcs, half-finished quests, low music sampling quality and tons of unresolved bugs. Due to the rushed nature of these changes, a good deal of unfinished code and assets were left on-disk and entire areas that were days away from completion were axed. Avellone would later lament the process, realizing they should have reduced the number of party members and cut the minigames.
- As insult to injury, Obsidian offered to make a content patch that would restore much of what had been left behind after the release of the game, but Lucasarts rejected the idea as they would not be able to patch the Xbox version of the game (it was not Live enabled) and it was not likely to generate further profit. Despite the troubles, the game became a Cult Classic for its Deconstruction take on the universe, in large part from the fan-made The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, which fixed many of the outstanding bugs and restored cut content left on the disk.
- In 2023, the KOTOR curse struck once again. A remake of Knights of the Old Republic was in progress over at Aspyr, and set to release later that year as an anniversary edition. However, a revolving door of hiring and firings on the production end, and the design and art directors being fired almost immediately after they presented a working demo resulted in the game being delayed indefinitely with a release date in 2025 at the earliest as Aspyr's parent company Saber Interactive took over development.
- At the same time this was going on, they were promoting their Nintendo Switch port for Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords with the Dummied Out content incorporated for free. However, the port was released with a Game-Breaking Bug (that was patched a month later) and a missed release window after promising a release for the Restored Content DLC sometime in Q3 2022, weakening players' faith in the remake even further.
- After the success of Rogue Squadron and Battle for Naboo, Factor 5 decided to continue the series on the upcoming GameCube, a launch title, no less. All this in just one year worth of development for a whole new hardware, which also required some programming miracles to implement graphics shaders the way they wanted (as the console didn't support hardware shaders). Rogue Leader still turned out pretty well, some considering it a Killer App. But things got out of hand with third game Rebel Strike, with the making-of documentary revealing that in an attempt to improve the game's performance, they made the brazen decision to scrap the entire game engine, and completely rebuild it from scratch. This ate into most of the development time, and wound up not having much of an improvement.
- Free Radical's Star Wars: Battlefront III was subject to a large amount of development troubles and studio in-fighting with LucasArts before it was scrapped. Despite it never being formally announced, the details of its turbulent production are infamous:
- The developer started production on an internal prototype for the next installment in the Battlefront series. According to interviews with co-founder Steve Ellis, the concept was so good that LucasArts was pushing them to release it as soon as possible, and they promised gameplay elements like a seamless transition from the player flying a ship in space to landing on a planet and exiting, cutting-edge tech upgrades and more. Likewise, LucasArts reportedly promised the developer that they could also develop a Battlefront IV if the third installment was successful.
- In early 2008, LucasArts went through a round of layoffs and the relationship between the publisher and developer soured. According to Ellis, the new executives were sour on the concept and wanted to trim as many projects as they could. Consequently, the game began missing content milestones, and previous cash injections that were given by LucasArts dried up. Other accounts claim that the company was deliberately lying about their progress on the game to continue receiving support payments from LucasArts. All of this was compounded by the failure of the PlayStation 3 game Haze, which sold poorly and garnered harsh critical reviews.
- The game missed an April 2009 launch date. Soon after, Free Radical was hit with a round of layoffs and the game was supposedly canceled for financial reasons. In interviews afterward, Ellis claimed that the project was "99% finished" and only needed bug fixing before it could be released, but his account was disputed by an anonymous ex-Lucasarts employee, who said that it was canned because Free Radical was missing target deadlines, lying about their progress and that the game tested poorly internally. Ellis stated that the game was mutually scrapped after it became clear that LucasArts couldn't afford to continue development.
- Gameplay of the reportedly near-final version leaked in 2012, and showed that the project was playable, but also suffered from random crashes and numerous bugs. The Free Radical team later published a video ridiculing LucasArts executives for failing to fund the project through to completion.
- To add insult to injury, Battlefront III wasn't the only Free Radical project that fell through. The team created a working prototype for Timesplitters 4, but were turned down by multiple publishers who complained that they didn't know how to market it. This was the final straw before the company disintegrated in 2009.
- The Battlefront project reportedly passed through several more developers before it was eventually given to DICE Software, who released a reboot in late 2015.
- Before its cancellation, the Star Wars game codenamed Ragtag suffered from tumultuous development according to Kotaku. Much of the defunct game's quagmire could be attributed to the actions of publisher Electronic Arts and Star Wars rights-holder LucasFilm.
- Before working on the game, developer studio Visceral Games was in bad shape after Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel were commercial and critical disappointments in 2013. These flops left the studio demoralized and short of manpower, leading to much bad blood between the studio and its owner Electronic Arts. When the studio was given the Star Wars license and writer Amy Hennig of the Uncharted series joined the team, there was hope that the studio could recover and deliver a solid game.
- Unfortunately, the studio was constantly hamstrung by Executive Meddling and culture clashes from EA and Disney. EA wanted the game to score a 90% on Metacritic and feature an innovative gameplay mechanic like the Gravity Gun. LucasFilm wanted to inspect and approve of every game design decision while also placing restrictions on the game's tone and lore. These demands have led to situations in which approving character costumes, which normally lasts about a week at most, could last for months.
- Furthermore, the Visceral Games was short on talented staff. The high costs of running the studio in San Francisco meant that EA couldn't hire new full-time permanent employees. Exacerbating issues was that several of Visceral's employees were pulled away to work on DLC for Battlefield Hardline. Motive Studios, one of EA's existing subsidiaries, tried helping out only to be pulled away to work on Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), leaving Visceral Games again short on manpower.
- The corporate-mandated usage of the Frostbite engine also gave headaches to the team. While the engine was great for shooters, it lacked many of the assets and tools necessary for third-person action games and RPGs. As a result, the team had to spend most of their time and money developing the necessary tool from the ground up.
- Given the constant red tape, lack of employees, and poor morale, it was clear by 2017 that Ragtag couldn't meet the demands of being a best-selling licensed Star Wars game with quality comparable to Knights of the Old Republic. The game was cancelled in 2017 and Visceral Games was shut down. Given how tumultuous the development phase became, it was seen as a mercy kill with many employees actually happy that they were let go.
