Total War developer Creative Assembly refocusing on strategy games after Hyenas failure

29.11.2023 - 14:37 / eurogamer.net / Haruki Satomi

UK developer Creative Assembly will refocus on making real-time strategy games following the cancellation of online extraction shooter Hyenas.

In a presentation to investors, Creative Assembly owner Sega admitted that the Hyenas project had been an attempt to accelerate the studio's growth — even though the game's genre lay outside the developer's usual area of expertise.

Hyenas was cancelled in September after years in development and a public demo at Gamescom only weeks before. The decision to cancel the project resulted in layoffs at Creative Assembly, with the majority of the project's team believed to be at risk.

«Each studio has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the favorable winds of the early Covid-19 period, coupled with the strong performance of each title, led us to adopt a strategy of accelerating more, even in areas where those studios have not tried yet for further growth,» Sega boss Haruki Satomi said.

«However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on the strength of each studio.

»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.

«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.»

Creative Assembly is of course best known for the creation of its popular and successful series of Total War strategy titles. The franchise has launched 16 games in the past 23 years.

Fellow UK studio Frontier has now said it will refocus on simulation games, following low sales of real-time strategy Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin.

Last month, Hyenas developers shared some of their frustrations with the now-cancelled project, which they claimed suffered from a lack of direction, and was a «metaphorical turd».