Hyenas from Creative Assembly was reportedly Sega's most expensive game to date before it was cancelled.

That's according to VGC and YouTuber Volound, which both report that the Japanese publishing giant was not happy with how work had progressed on the project. Apparently, Hyenas was plagued with problems during its life, in part due to work shifting from the engine that Creative Assembly used for 2014's Alien Isolation to Unreal Engine mid-way through development.

That's on top of a "total lack of direction" in terms of what the game was meant to be.

Volund reports that towards the end of development, Sega had staff from Japan "more or less permanently" in the UK to keep an eye on what was happening.

"This has NEVER happened the whole time I’ve worked at CA, they occasionally came to visit and check how a game was looking but as I said previously, generally hands-off,” a developer told the YouTuber.

Staff at Creative Assembly are now facing redundancies off the back of Hyenas being cancelled.

“I’m not angry with Sega for cancelling, to be honest, I firmly believe it only would’ve lost more money otherwise," the anonymous developer continued. "They’re typically a light touch publisher, I guess because, in the past, the studio has been so profitable, I fear those days are now over, but we’ll see.

“I’m angry with the shit leadership, and for the people above them for not dealing with them. I had hoped that maybe after Hyenas flopped we could be kept on at CA if the next project was another nice low risk contract job like HW2, but most of us are likely being made redundant and I’m ok with that really.

“What I’m actually furious about is that the redundancies are affecting people who had nothing to do with Hyenas. Like IT, operations, marketing, HR, even some people over on TW, they bear no responsibility for this binfire.”

In a message to investors, parent company Sega Sammy said that the reason for the title being axed was low profitability in its European business.