Reporter Mike Musgrove digs into the ESA's recent difficulties in today's Washington Post.

Musgrove brings an interesting perspective to the piece, given that he wrote one of the early profiles of embattled ESA CEO Michael Gallagher last September. In response to Musgrove's questions about losing Activision, Vivendi, LucasArts and id as member companies, Gallagher said:

There are hundreds of trade associations in Washington and virtually all feature member turnover and the ESA is no exception.

Full Disclosure Dept: The ECA is the parent company of GamePolitics…

Following Activision and Vivendi out the door, LucasArts has made its exit from the Entertainment Software Association official.

GamePolitics broke the news last week that signs pointed to LucasArts leaving the organization which represents the interests of US video game publishers.

Since that time, both LucasArts and the ESA went into silent mode - until late today (Friday afternoons being the corporate mind's preferred time for dropping bad news).

Despite giving the kiss-off to ESA, LucasArts says that it will still exhibit at E3 in July.

We should note that while working on this story no fewer than five LucasArts PR reps failed to return GP's phone calls, e-mails and IM's. The ESA also chose not to respond. Notice that nobody was denying the rumor. Obviously, there was a good reason for that.

Joystiq has the ESA's press release, which the publisher's group did not deign to send to GamePolitics. I assume that's by way of payback for reporting the rumor.

Classy.

Last week, GamePolitics first began to suspect that Activision and Vivendi might have left the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) after noticing that the game publishing giants were no longer listed on the member section of the ESA website.

Today there is another major company missing from that list: LucasArts

We've got messages out to several LucasArts contacts in an attempt to confirm. An ESA representative promised us he would "look into that."

So, we'll call this one officially a rumor... for now.

But if true, the exit of LucasArts immediately on the heels of Activision and Vivendi could signal that the ESA, founded in 1994 to represent the interests of US video game publishers, is rapidly taking on water.