That’s not quite true about LOTR either. They didn’t support it much for years and nothing really happened. And now its getting far more support than just fulfilling contractual obligations.

Why would a GW shop worker know something that hasn’t spread like wildfire on the internet already? Never say never, but it seems a bit random.

Not to mention GW stand to make mountains of profit with their latest rebirth of the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game since all they’re really doing is re-releasing ~20 year old sprues.  It’s a great game, but 90% of what they sell for MESBG has already been released in past incarnations of the game, they’re just putting it back into steady availability with new boxes.

The rumours aren’t *that* weird when you consider (a) the delays of announced (legion)/Star wars products and (b) how the End of life for Destiny was announced … the rumour isn’t strange.

There’s stuff happening to Xwing that suggests they’re having a re-think at the least.

I doubt anyone at FFG is going to mention the loss of license, because that’d would kill the sale of existing stock (and I’m pretty sure they would rather sell than destroy … ).
Disney isn’t going to mention anything either, because that might interfere with marketing plans of any new licensee.

It is however fairly obvious that FFG/Asmodeus are restructuring and cutting costs where possible.

Whether or not this means they drop/cancel/lose the Star Wars license is unknown, because we don’t know the terms of that license and thus we don’t know if that is an option at all.

I suspect it also depends on how the Star Wars products are selling.
Negative rumours could create a death spiral (people stop buying based on rumours -> fewer profits -> fewer products made -> fewer customers -> …  -> the end) .

I’d argue that if they had lost the license and/or were dropping the license then they wouldn’t have announced new products after the recent delays.

I had heard that the RPG arm of FFG was finishing up and Star Wars is probably the biggest part of that. That was some time ago and I note they haven’t had much in the way on new releases for ages

It doesn’t help that there have been several Star Wars RPG variants since the dawn of time.
I kind of hope that Modiphius gets the license, because the 2D20 system is made for the kind of space opera adventures that happen within the Star Wars universe.

As for using freelancers … it wouldn’t be the only RPG publisher doing that. It kind of makes sense, because once you’ve got the core rules there is no need for keeping a ton of writers on the payroll. All you really need is an editor/product owner who checks for consistency of the additional content created by freelancers.