After killing Hyenas, Sega is banishing Creative Assembly back to genres it already knows well

After deep-sixing Hyenas out of the blue earlier this year, Sega has revealed that it plans to have Creative Assembly redirect its attention towards genres that it’s already proven itself in going forwards.

The Japanese publisher cancelled the multiplayer FPS and a number of other unannounced titles back in September, having made the decision following a review conducted “in response to the lower profitability of the European region”. In a statement posted to Twitter in the aftermath of the move, Creative Assembly suggested that Sega’s choice hadn’t been easy to accept and alluded to its plans for the game being “ambitious”.

Now, as reported by VGC, Sega Sammy Holdings president and CEO Haruki Satomi has shed more light on what happened to the game in the publisher’s eyes, as part of a recent financial results briefing presentation.

“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,” the exec said. “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.”

He also touched on what the studio’s future, as well as that of Sega’s other European studios, will look like going forwards. “As part of the process of structural reform centred on Creative Assembly,” Satomi said, “we intend to optimise the workflow and concentrate their resources on the development of their specialty genres.”

So, it seems like fans of the Total War series might be in for more turn-based things than they might have gotten if Creative Assembly was still having a go at pushing into the multiplayer shooter space.

That said, it’s a shame that we’ll likely never get to see what Hyenas could’ve developed into, especially given the fairly positive reception to its closed beta in September.

In other Sega-related news, Sega of America has recently had an unfair labour practice complaint lodged against it by workers who alleged that the company had forced temporary staff into a meeting to inform them that their jobs were being outsourced, rather than negotiating with their union.