I do follow Star Wars (it's hard not to) and I think there are some similarities. I think the original four Wing Commander games could be compared to the original Star Wars movies very easily.
Star Wars and Return of the Jedi and Wing Commander I, III and IV were all projects where the buck stopped with the famous creator. Now, inside that story would Star Wars have been as amazing without Ralph McQuarrie, or Wing Commander III without Chris Douglas? No -- but in both cases they're team members who are there because they were selected by Lucas and Roberts. Any collaborative work functions that way, and the credit has to flow upwards.
Wing Commander II and The Empire Strikes Back are both interesting outliers. ESB had a brilliant director with a degree of control over the project and Wing Commander II had Roberts stepping back and letting others run the project. In both cases, a big part of why they happened was that the famous creator didn't yet understand that the IP was his legacy. Chris Roberts believed he would go on and do other games like he had before Wing Commander... and Lucas similarly didn't yet grasp how much his name was going to be assosciated with Star Wars forever, no matter who the director of the specific picture was.
I think the prequels are an entirely different story, though, and it's likely something Chris Roberts won't face. We probably won't know the full story behind them for another decade or two, but I don't really believe the narrative the fans have constructed so far. It's not so much about Lucas being a bad director who no longer had a good support network as it is Lucas going into the project without understanding how the audience had changed in twenty years. I think Star Wars prequels with other directors could have been fascinating (or terrible) and that Lucas should have considered going that route... but I don't think it was their One Big Problem.
I mean, look at the gulf between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Phantom Menace is unquestionably Lucas trying to make a movie that will be completely enthralling to kids... in 1977. He didn't *get* that the audience wasn't the same anymore and wouldn't appreciate so much of what he was going for. The last eleven year old who would have thought Jar Jar was hilarious or that it was super rad to see kid Anakin flying a space fighter died in 1990. I'm betting that Phantom Menace was EXACTLY the movie he sat down to create and... honestly I kind of like that. Then there's a kind of profound sadness with the other two, then, where you watch the movies and realize he's no longer doing the (weird, possibly terrible) film he wants but is instead frustratingly trying to figure out what his fans even want now. And he never really cracks it.
So I think Chris Roberts will face different challenges. As I mentioned in that other thread, he famously pursues HIS idea and doesn't worry about focus grouping or otherwise involving the potential audience... so whatever he comes up with will be his Phantom Menace. We just have to hope he has a better understanding of what makes a fun game.
(As an aside about the rare impact of the two franchises, I will say that I lost a LOT of respect for Lucas in 1999, when he wanted FOX to kill the Wing Commander movie (eventually being so petty as to insist that FOX make a formal announcement that the Star Wars trailer was NOT attached to Wing Commander... even though it was.) I also /gained/ a lot of respect for Chris Roberts' business sense at the same time, when I heard that his contract with FOX actually specified that they had to put Wing Commander in theaters before Phantom Menace or he would get the rights to the film back himself.)