Creative Assembly, Makers of Total War, Will Return to Games They Know Best
Following the cancellation of Hyenas, Creative Assembly will be delegated to work on projects in the RTS genre, the games for which the studio is best known.
At the end of September, Sega Sammy decided to to cancel the development of the nearly completed online shooter Hyenas. Creative Assembly's game went into the trash along with several other unannounced projects. And while Sega argued its decision on the grounds of "reduced profitability" of the company's games in Europe, another element played an important role in all this.
During a recent presentation of financial results, Sega Sammy CEO Haruki Satomi stated that the cancellation of the game and a number of layoffs were contributed to by Creative Assembly's unfamiliarity with the genre it had to work with.
"Every studio has its strengths and weaknesses, but the favorable winds in the early period of COVID-19, coupled with the good performance of each title, led us to adopt a strategy of greater acceleration, even in areas where these studios had not tried to develop further," Satomi explained (via VGC).
The company's helmsman explained that the problems resulting from the new policy have now prompted Sega Sammy to orient developers to the genres in which they have the most experience.
"Some studios have done well and others have not, so we decided to refocus on the strengths of each. Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre, but took on the challenge of creating Hyenas, which is a network game in the FPS genre," Satomi continues
Satomi stressed that although the quality of the cancelled project was satisfactory, Sega concluded that it would not be able to meet the demands of gamers.
"Although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel work on Hyenas, because we didn't think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users and that we would be able to maintain it as a competitive online proposition for a long time," Sega chief revealed.
During the Q&A session, Satomi once again mentioned that "as part of the structural reform process centered around Creative Assembly, the company intends to "optimize its work organization and focus the studio's resources on development in its key genres."
It is therefore to be expected that the developers will be instructed to create a new real-time strategy in the near future. It remains to be hoped that they will be able to restore the good name of the Total War series after the failed Pharaoh.
