Sega says Creative Assembly will return to genres it knows best after Hyenas’ cancellation

Sega has said Creative Assembly will go back to working on the genres it knows best, following the decision to cancel Hyenas.

The Japanese publisher announced in September that it was cancelling the multiplayer shooter “and some unannounced titles under development” in Europe, following at least six years of development on the project.

Developer Creative Assembly has suggested the game was cancelled due to “ambitious” plans and high competition in the multiplayer shooter space.

However, during a financial results briefing presentation held this month, Sega Sammy Holdings president and group CEO Haruki Satomi stated that the developer was working on a genre it didn’t know well enough, resulting in the game’s cancellation and a number of redundancies.

“Each studio has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the favorable winds of the early COVID-19 period, coupled with the strong performance of each title, led us to adopt a strategy of accelerating more, even in areas where those studios have not tried yet for further growth,” Satomi said.

“However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on the strengths of each studio.

“To put it simply, Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre, but they took on the challenge of developing Hyenas, an online game in the FPS genre.

“However, although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel the development of Hyenas because we did not think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users when we considered whether we could really operate this as a competitive online game for a long period of time.”

Further reading

2

Cancelled Hyenas was ‘Sega’s biggest budget game ever’, it’s claimed

And Hollywood director Neill Blomkamp reportedly provided story direction

During the Q&A session following the presentation, Satomi was asked about the future structure of Sega’s European studios.

“As part of the process of structural reform centered on Creative Assembly,” he replied, “we intend to optimise the workflow and concentrate their resources on the development of their specialty genres.”

Reports following the game’s cancellation suggested that staff at Creative Assembly were unhappy with its development, with some sources claiming that a lack of direction, disruptive engine change, and overly-cautious design contributed to its downfall.