Creative Assembly to Refocus on RTS, After Sega Report Pins Hyenas Cancellation on Studio Mismatch
Sega has a new financial report that, like so many companies in the industry, discusses layoffs and project cancellations. Creative Assembly, as noted in the report, saw in-development FPS Hyenas canceled in large part over concerns that the team wasn’t up to running a live service FPS long-term.
“To put it simply,” the report says, “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.”
These changes are also resulting in cutbacks at Creative Assembly, including layoffs “currently underway”, and to be confirmed later, along with additional cost-cutting.
The reveals were made amid changes for a number of Sega-owned studios, with an emphasis on getting every studio to work on what they’re good at. “However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on strength of each studio.”
Creative Assembly has a long track record of successful RTS development, with theTotal War franchise a highlight. So, Creative Assembly will work on RTS games. Like Frontier Developments, which just announce, also via financial update, that it will be refocusing on the genre that brought them success, this reflects a trend towards somewhat safer development choices for the near-future. This isn’t to say that risk-taking is dead, exactly, but we’ve yet to come to the end of these cutbacks as studios sort out their 2023-24 budget priorities and
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