Creative Assembly has had a rough year, the biggest story out of them in recent news was the disastrous cancellation of their Hyenas project in September, but things have been looking bad at Creative Assembly for while now, announcing an investigation on abuse in the workplace last October. Even their flagship franchise Total War has been performing rather poorly with their latest game, Total War: Pharaoh, not even reaching 5,000 player peak (compared to Total War: Warhammer III’s all time peak of 166,519 players and Total War: Three Kingdom’s 191,816 peak) and recently the Creative Assembly forums as well as their Steam forums have been cracking down rather hard on their respective communities. With all these dominoes falling it’s no surprise the community is rallying around the rumors and supposed leaks from YouTuber Volound that Creative Assembly has sacked 40% of their staff, including Chief Product Officer Robert Bartholomew. With that said, these are all still leaks and rumors, and nothing is set in stone.
Even if these rumors weren’t true it really sheds a light to the state of Creative Assembly that so many of their own community are ready to believe these rumors. Hyenas was widely reported to be the most costly game Sega had ever funded, with price estimates reaching an astounding $100 million, and when that game was canceled merely three weeks after the beta test it was clear that some changes were going to be happening in Creative Assembly, and mass layoffs of their workforce would make sense in that regard.
On the Total War front fans have long-since voice their dissatisfaction with Creative Assembly’s approach to their games’ live services. Total War: Warhammer III’s release was infamously riddled with bugs and the amount prices of said DLC for the game have been borderline exploitative, with the content in said DLC clearly not satisfying anybody in their audience; the latest Shadows of Change expansion currently sits at a violently red “Mostly Negative” reviewer score on Steam out of 2,198 reviews. Many of the reviews bring up the lack of any interesting new units, or rather the lack of any new units at all, and most reviews essentially saying it’s vastly overpriced for how barebones it is.
And that’s not even getting to Total War: Pharaohs, heavily criticized by the few people that played it as a complete reskin of Total War Saga: Troy with some cosmetics slapped on it and re-sold at full price.
Many of the reviews and opinions you can read on the current state of Creative Assembly lay the blame on the executives at both Sega and Creative Assembly themselves, arguing that the heads of the companies are just trying to exploit and suppress the previously loyal Total War fanbase in an attempt to make up for their massive blunder in Hyenas. While the rumors of the downsizing as well as the firing of Robert Bartholomew may or may not be true, what is true is that the fans of Creative Assembly’s games are extremely dissatisfied with how they’re currently being treated, and that Creative Assembly themselves are undeniably in a bind both in how their games are doing commercially and critically, as well as the losses they’ve accrued after the Hyenas incident.
Time will tell whether or not a 40% reduction in their working staff is true, but the fact of the matter is that even if it isn’t something needs to change at Creative Assembly lest they risk bringing those leaks and more into reality.