Sega has revealed layoffs and cancelled games at their UK based game studio, Creative Assembly.
Creative Assembly is chiefly known for their war strategy game series, Total War. They had also demonstrated they were capable of handling other genres with their critically acclaimed licensed game, Alien Isolation.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, unfortunately, Sega made this decision and announced it after a review of their business. This was Sega’s statement to the public:
“In response to the lower profitability of the European region, we have reviewed the title portfolio of each development base in Europe and the resulting action will be to cancel ‘Hyenas’ and some unannounced titles under development.
Accordingly, we will implement a write-down of work-in-progress for titles under development.
We will implement reduction of various fixed expenses at several group companies in relevant region, centered on the Creative Assembly Ltd. We expect to incur one-time expenses related to reduction of fixed expenses.”
So, to put things simply, Sega explained that they found out that they weren’t profitable in EU at the moment, so they have to cancel a few games, as well as ‘reduce expenses’ in Creative Assembly. Sega later confirmed that this would include layoffs, though they have yet to reveal how many people would be laid off, and a time frame.
Sega is also already predicting a loss to be reported on fiscal year 2023, which is ending March 31, 2024. So Sega themselves expect to lose money out of all of this. But this move was necessary, because they were standing to lose even more money, and possibly the viability of the company as a whole, if they didn’t make these changes.
Hyenas was a robbery themed extraction shooter, that was supposed to release this year on PC and consoles. To distinguish itself from the pack, Hyenas had you playing as teams of three, with as many as five teams fighting in a single map at the same time. Whatever promise this game had, may have died out in development.
Sega had this to say about it to investors a few months ago:
“As this is a challenging title, we are striving to improve its quality towards the release on the front line of development. We are also making final adjustments to its business model in parallel.”
We will likely never know anything about the unannounced titles, save if people who worked on these games revealed those secrets. We wish the best for the staff at Creative Assembly and hope they can bounce back in the future.
