Sega wants Creative Assembly to keep making Total War games

After Sega canceled Creative Assembly’s multiplayer game-slash-shooter Hyenas, the company wants CA to keep doing what they do best: Total War games. Sega CEO Haruki Satomi made the comments during the company’s latest financial results briefing, where Satomi also provided some insight behind why Sega canceled Hyenas to begin with (thanks, VGC).

Satomi said Sega had confidence in Hyenas, but the company believed it wasn’t quite good enough to compete in a highly-saturated genre and admitted their ambitions were grander than the studio could realize. VGC’s sources suggested a slightly different story, as workers at CA pointed to lack of direction, overly-safe design, and a mid-development engine change as the primary problems.

Satomi recognized that Sega took a risk by tasking a studio that excels at creating grand strategy games with making a fast-paced FPS game. It’s a confusing decision, but the reason behind it is one of the industry’s recurring themes from the past two years.

“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,” Satomi said. “However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on the strengths of each studio.

“As part of the process of structural reform centered on Creative Assembly, we intend to optimize the workflow and concentrate their resources on the development of their specialty genres,” Satomi said.

Satomi didn’t hint at the nature of Creative Assembly’s next project or whether development has begun yet.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF