ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Creative Assembly to focus on RTS titles after Hyenas cancellation

Creative Assembly to focus on RTS titles after Hyenas cancellation

UK developer Creative Assembly is going to be returning to its roots and focusing on real-time strategy titles.

That's according to the president and Group CEO of parent company Sega Sammy, Haruki Satomi, who told investors in the firm's most recent financial results that the studio is going back to working on offline RTS titles. This comes in the wake of the Japanese publishing giant cancelling online shooter Hyenas, which Creative Assembly had been working on for some time.

"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," Satomi said.

"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."

The cancellation of Hyenas has resulted in layoffs at Creative Assembly. The project was said to have the highest budget of any Sega game to date.

The Japanese firm is also shaking up how its publishing business is divided up between the USA and Europe.

"In addition, we have divided the area of responsibility between Sega of America and Sega Europe as publishing console video game through mainly Sega of America, and PC game publishing through Sega Europe until now," Satomi continued. "But we will change this into a new structure by integrating their marketing and development management functions, etc as well as their global multi-platform roll-out functions to create a structure for driving business efficiency."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.