(Just conjecture) I wonder if LucasArts already has a plan in the works, of if this was just the best way to kill off SAGA before they upgrade to a 4e style system? Let's face it, it wasn't really all that long ago that the SAGA update hit the bricks.
I mean how would it look if yet ANOTHER edition update came out of WotC's doors?
Agreed. It would look pretty bad. And given that there are a lot of people who stuck with 3.5 or bailed to
Pathfinder - I expect that WotC would rather not go through that with their current customers once again.
Revise, reset, resell as a business strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns in the short run.
Something like this would certainly fit the facts if, say, WotC suddenly announced they were at the end of the product cycle and were no longer going to produce new SAGA products.
And then more or less
sat on the license for a year to as many as three years, doing little more than making new mins and otherwise supporting their existing product line with moderate online articles and reprints of existing material... and then came out with a new edition.
That would make sense, if they believed they had super-saturated the market and it was time to give the RPG line a rest.
But the problem is, not renewing a license at a time where there is a new major MMO to be released in a year's time, and a potential live action TV series a few years off (if it happens - I'm sceptical of this long-rumoured live action series, tbh) amounts to hoping nobody picks it up in the interim -- and that you can then you re-license it in, say, two years and carry on with a whole new system form that point. (SAGA is already very 4E, so I'd say more 4.5 or even 5th ed).
Whatever the case, while that might transpire in the future, I can't see it now as part of "The Plan". It might be the result of good luck -- but not the result of good management, imo.
I think what happened from WotC's side is that the market has been flooded with minis, has been saturated with a multiplicity of three SW Rules systems in ten years and that this particular system is pretty much at the end of its life cycle anyways. Sure, they could put out some more products for another two years, say, but it would be pretty much filling in the corners at this point with books and rules that are increasingly more narrowly focused. It just didn't make sense on an economic basis for them to go forward with license renewal, much as they would have liked to, and so they didn't. Pure business decision. The End.
The view from Lucasfilm is of course very different. They want to make money from the property (direct $$, it's what they do with Star Wars , after all) and they want to use it to bolster and leverage and reinforce the overall success of their other products and brands (synergy - indirect $$).
I think we can take WotC at their word on this one. As for Lucas? We'll have to see what their fallback plan is. Given their release, it
looks like they probably have one. We'll see.
