Creative Assembly appears to be returning to what they know best, real-time strategy titles. In a financial results briefing post, Sega’s CFO and Senior Executive VP Koichi Fukazawa stated that the UK-based studio will refocus on developing titles within that genre, something that they have been well known for over the better part of 30 plus years. This reveal comes shortly after the recently canceled online first-person shooter Hyenas, which Sega shut down themselves, as they expected it would “record a loss for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024,” specifically in the European region.
Fukazawa goes into this a bit, and also mentions that this applies to not just Creative Assembly, but to all of their umbrella companies. They do zero in on Creative Assembly though, as Fukazawa addressed the elephant in the room which is the canceled Hyenas. “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,” Fukuzawa said.
He touches on the reasoning as to why it was canceled, which differs a bit from the initial reason given back in September. “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 said. Hyenas was initially revealed back in June 2022, and was a huge departure for Creative Assembly, as stated by Sega.
This was compounded by other lingering issues that the studio is currently going through, which include allegations of workplace abuse as well as potentially letting go of 40% of their staff in 2022. Hopefully, the studio will see a much more streamlined year with 2024, as they return to the RTS genre, most likely with their longest-running franchise: Total War.