Sega cancel Hyenas and several unannounced games due to Covid-era losses
The Creative Assembly's Hyenas - a sci-fi extraction shooter about robbing Martian billionaires, which Ed deemed "a surprising amount of fun" when he saw it at Gamescom - is no more. Sega have cancelled the forthcoming looter FPS together with several unannounced titles - a stripping-down of the publisher's European business in response to financial losses Sega are blaming partly on Covid.
In a letter to investors from CEO and president Haruki Satomi, Sega announced that they expect to record a loss "in the Consumer area" for the fiscal year ending 31st March 2024, partly thanks to European social-distancing measures during the pandemic. "[T]he business environment surrounding the Consumer area has been rapidly changing, including reactionary decline from the stay-at-home demand in COVID-19 and the economic downturn due to inflation in European region, and profitability has been lowered mainly in European bases," the letter begins.
"To promptly adapt to these changes in the environment and improve profitability, we have decided to implement structural reforms aimed at increasing efficiency, mainly at our European bases and reviewed the title portfolio in those bases," it continues.
Hyenas is one of several titles from Sega's European outfits that are getting the axe. The statement doesn't specify whether the other, unannounced games are Creative Assembly projects. As a reminder, the publisher's European studios include Football Manager developer Sports Interactive, mobile game developer Hardlight, Endless Space developer Amplitude, Two Point Hospital developer Two Point Studios and Rovio, creator of ye olde Angry Birds, which Sega bought only last month.
The Sega statement adds that "we will implement reduction
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