Decipher announced today that Lucasfilm has ended their deal to produce Star Wars CCG. The announcement was made here today. In an interview with Warren Holland, details were given out:

All right, thank you Warren. I think the first question that I have for you which is going to be on a lot of people's minds is, "Why did Lucasfilm decide not to renew the Star Wars CCG license with Decipher?"

Well... let me start by saying that rumors have been floating around about this license for a couple of years, and I guess everyone's going to have to draw their own conclusions on why Lucasfilm ultimately made this decision.

But... I have to be very honest and say that I don't believe this decision is a very wise one on the part of Lucasfilm, and I'm not really telling you anything that I haven't already told them. However, Lucasfilm is the owner of the Star Wars property. And within certain limits, they can do with it as they wish and we all have to accept that. Also, as many of you know, Hasbro is a master toy licensee for Star Wars and George Lucas is a 10% owner of the company. And... It's no secret that Hasbro paid $500 million for the Star War license and it just hasn't performed that well for them. So, I think we had to contend with all of that.

I'm not going to pick on Lucasfilm here, but I will acknowledge that the past few years working with them has been a very frustrating experience for Decipher. There were many things we wanted to do and we were simply not allowed to do them. But through all of this time we've been very loyal to the property even when there were reasons for us to exit. We held the Star Wars license for more than six years, and we successfully produced and marketed some of the most popular trading card games of all time, and I'm very proud of that. So, Lucas was always overjoyed with our products and not one time in six years did I ever hear a complaint from them about the quality of what we created.

I think that prior to the purchase of WotC by Hasbro, the relationship between Decipher and Lucasfilm was great and our Star Wars games had a very bright future. In fact, Lucasfilm was going to expand our licenses. But, a lot of legal issues were raised about the manner in which Lucasfilm handled this license and I've just resolved those issues with them in a settlement in the past few months and I'm not going to be disclosing the terms of that, but it's just kind of opened up our ability to talk about this a little bit more at this time.

Our thoughts? Well, if the rights are going to Wizards of the Coast, it looks like another case of Lucasfilm putting all their eggs in one basket. Promotions for Episode I were all through Pepsi which owns Frito-Lay, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC. That promotion ended up being a major bust. Lucasfilm put all their eggs in one basket again with Hasbro who also owned Galoob. Galoob went into hard times after Epsidoe I and Hasbro had more overstock of toys than they knew what to do with. Now, by putting the Star Wars CCG into the hands of Wizards of the Coast, they're putting it in conrtol of the same company that does the fan club, RPG, the Celebration, and more. Oh yeah, and it's owned by Hasbro. Is this a good move to unite the franchise under one banner or is this setting up Star Wars merchandising for a horrible downfall? Time will tell.

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