A few weeks back, LucasArts released the highly anticipated title Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. While it may never grace a "worst games of all time" list, it didn't exactly score the kind of reviews expected people expected (read the Tom's Games review here). While the title still became a hit on the consoles, the PC Gaming Alliance had a bone to pick with LucasArts over the absence of The Force Unleashed on the PC.

Randy Stude, President of the PCGA and an Intel employee, unleashed all kinds of Force lightning on the house that Lucas built this week on Videogamer.com. Stude criticized LucasArts for the lack of PC support for The Force Unleashed, which released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii as well as mobile platforms like the iPhone.

The entire conflict stems from LucasArts' concerns over hardware requirements for a potential PC version of The Force Unleashed, which the game company has said repeatedly would be too high. During the Star Wars 30th anniversary convention, project leader Haden Blackman said LucasArts wanted the game to have as wide an audience as possible but that the hardware requirements for a PC version would simply be too high. "Part of this is because of the hardware constraints," he said.

More recently, LucasArts producer Cameron Suey echoed Blackman's comments in an interview with Videogamer.com. "The PC being the gaming platform that it is, someone with a $4,000 high-end system would definitely be able to play [The Force Unleashed]," said Suey, "but someone with a low-end PC would have a watered down experience, they would have to turn all the settings down and it wouldn't be the same game."

Needless to say, the head of an organization whose main goal is to "drive worldwide growth of PC gaming," isn't going to be happy when a developer like LucasArts, which had traditionally published titles for the PC, skips the platform on one of its biggest releases in years. In regards to Suey's comments on the PC, Stude said "That's not an educated answer. In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response."

As if going after Suey wasn't enough, Stude made his feelings on LucasArts' current direction crystal clear. "LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time," Stude said. "I think the last good PC game they made was probably Jedi Knight 2, and even their strategy games weren't that great. So I can understand why they would make that call." Stude even touched on recent goings-on over at LucasArts relating to layoffs and the studio's new approach as a manager of Lucasfilm IP for other developers. Calling it "Job shopping", Stude also said that LucasArts was nothing more than "an intellectual property machine."

In the end, it wouldn't be a surprise to find out that piracy worries also played a role in the lack of a PC version for The Force Unleashed, that being the popular answer for many prominent developers and publishers these days. In any event, it looks like the PCGA won't be inducting LucasArts as a member of the organization anytime soon. Hopefully Stude and LucasArts can make nice before Grim Fandango 2 comes out - whenever that is.

Join our discussion on this topic