As part of an effort to restructure their company, Sega announced last week that they would be canceling their upcoming live service shooter Hyenas along with several unannounced titles being developed in Europe. This came as a shock Considering Hyenas had just had a beta and was considered close to release, after six years of development on it.
The developer behind the game, Creative Assembly, has suggested that the reason for this cancellation was due to their “Ambitious” plans for the game. They also pointed to the crowded multiplayer shooter space as another reason, though it should be noted the development of the game has been referred to internally as “challenging.”
However, total War YouTuber Volound released a video on his channel that featured anonymous devs blaming a lack of direction, an engine change, and over-cautious design choices for the game’s eventual downfall. This has also been corroborated by sources close to gaming news site VGC.
One of these anonymous developers posted:
So what went wrong? Total lack of direction, many of the leadership asleep at the wheel but they never seem to lose their jobs. An engine change, part way through the process. Attempting to break into a saturated market, and not committing to do anything adventurous with the game.
The title was greenlit shortly after Alien: Isolation was released to critical praise but poor sales. The plan was to release a game with a much broader commercial appeal, summoning games like Destiny and Escape From Tarkov as inspiration. In this original version, it was a PvPvE game with players attempting to loot multiple vaults while fighting players and AI in the process.
In this version, the idea was to be a touch grittier, with characters having “Lovable Rogue Vibes. It was described during the interview by another developer:
In the early days, Hyenas aimed for a ‘lovable rogues’ vibe, surviving in a messed-up world controlled by the elite, channeling Han Solo with a bit of Firefly for good measure. It sounded intriguing, but the details were vague. Earth was in ruins, the rich had everything, steal to survive, and a gritty sci-fi setting with a touch of NASA.
At this point the game was going to use the same Engine as Alien: Isolation. Due to issues with the tools on that engine, a decision was made to move the game to Unreal Engine. During this process, several developers had to be moved to work on the next in Creative Assembly’s Total War franchise.
This remained in place until District 9 and Gran Turismo director Niel Bloomkamp visited the offices in 2019. Again an anonymous dev stated of this visit:
He comes to visit the studio, and he’s shown what we’re up to,” one source told Volound. “He has some ideas of a direction to take it in, basically that you’re not stealing to survive, but Netflix/Steam/etc doesn’t exist anymore so DVD boxsets, music, games, all that physical media is now super valuable.
He also had that idea of inserting a lot of internet humour and stuff. He even made a mood video to show what he was thinking, and to be honest after that period of ‘wtf are we doing here’, it was a real shot in the arm to have some DIRECTION (the project so often felt utterly rudderless).
Hyenas is believed to be one of the ‘Super Games’ Sega would often refer to during financial results. These were very ambitious, big-budget AAA titles that Sega was publishing or developing that they hoped would pay big dividends.
While no official price has been given on how much Sega spent on development for the title, several developers have placed the amount close to 100 million dollars. This would effectively make the project more expensive than previous record holder Shenmue which was estimated to cost around 70 million in 1999.
These developers went on to say that while they were not angry at Sega, the cancelation of the game has led to a round of layoffs at creative assembly. Many of these terminations include positions that were not involved in development at all. They stated:
I’m not angry with Sega for cancelling, to be honest, I firmly believe it only would’ve lost more money otherwise. 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 s*** 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.
This is only one of many situations like this happening around the industry currently. Epic Games has also recently laid off 16% of their staff amid lower returns for their title Fortnite. Team17 has also recently announced layoffs to members of their QA department, a position that is usually contract work.
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