Smed on the news

1) Yes Raph is leaving SOE. It's not some big dramatic thing - it's simple.. he's at the end of his contract with SOE and he wants to try some new things that realistically we can't do here at SOE right now. The truth is Raph is an incredibly talented and amazingly creative person and he has 1000 great ideas. He's done some great things in this industry and I know he'll continue to do great things. Raph's been with SOE for 5 years. I've enjoyed working with him a lot and he's made some great contributions. At the end of the day we have a finite amount of resources and projects that we can have in development at any one time. He wants to try some new stuff that we can't do at this stage.. we have a lot of things we are trying to do as a company right now. I'm always surprised by the amount of rampant speculation that goes on about stuff like this.

2) No - in fact LucasArts isn't "pulling the Star Wars" license or anything of the kind. We have a very long term deal and things are fine between our companies. It's complete and utter fabrication. I feel like we need extra-special tin-foil hats in the shape of Darth Vader's mask or something. What happens is one website writes something - then 5 more link to it.. so it must all of a sudden be true. I wish it worked that way.

Well, I was wrong.

They still have a secret reserve of smileys. Smed is more ostinate than me.