As a freelancer I am not privvy to the internal decision-making at Wizards. That said, I have worked "inside the walls" of that company, so I feel qualified to speak in broad terms about my best guess (no better than anyone else's) on why Saga came about.
First, as long as Bill Slavicsek has any pull with RPG design at Wizards, there's SW RPG love at that company. Bill has a real understanding of SW, and a love for the property. If you don't happen to recognize Bill's name, do a quick internet search. You'll see why Slavicsek and SW RPG go hand-in-hand.
Second, there's a limited amount of resources for any given idea at Wizards. When they started the SW Minis line, and it started selling like hotcakes, Wizards had to make a decision. They could have continued producing RPG books with sliding sales and just done minis with the manpower they had left. Instead they grabbed the tiger by the tail and comitted to the thing doing great as best they could. Good business decision.
But continuing a game line doesn't take as much manpower as geting one started. The mini line is well known and well established. Plus, now there hasn't been a core RPG since the 3rd movie, the 30th ann. is here, it's been long enough that they can produce a whole new edition without being hunted dwn by angry mobs, and the market already has a lot of SW minis available. With the previous edition, the question fans asked me more than anything else was "what do you use for miniatures?" The lead mini line didn't sell well, so I suspect part of the thnking was that since the -tools- are finally commonly available, the -game- should come back.
Honestly, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was when I got the call to work on the Saga edition. Wizards always said the line was on hiatus, rather than dead. But I had sadly packed by own SW source material away, and I had to think about whether or not I wanted to get into this again. I almost didn't. But having the opportunity to work with Rodney again, and the call of my inner-child, brought me around. And I'm glad they did.
I can't say for certain that Lucasfilm didn't prod this, but I doubt it. Lucasfilm approves everything, suggests some things, but rarely gets that proactive on something like a whole line. And if Wizards thought they'd lose money on the RPG they would do it (and certainly wouldn't have new books coming out). Instead Wizards hired Rodney to help run the whole SW line. (Best man for the job, in my opinion.)
With any business as big as Wizards there are going to be lots of factors going into a decision like this. In my heart, I like to believe Chris Perkins and Bill Salvicsek stood on the roof, faced the wind, smelled that the time was right, turned to one another and nodded smiling.
I'm just glad they caled me right after that.
