Details about the canceled Sega shooter Hyenas have been coming to light via anonymous sources following the news that the game is never coming to market. The game’s cancellation followed a disappointing public playtest at Gamescom in August. It also just finished an extended closed beta right before the plug was pulled.
In 2022, Sega began hyping up the next big title that was supposed to come out of the studio that created the 2014 horror gem Alien Isolation. The game was called Hyenas and was immediately met with cautious excitement and some skepticism. It would be a multiplayer shooter going up against popular titles in the same genre as Overwatch 2, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, and many more. The skepticism wound up being justified by the recent cancellation of Hyenas. After the cancellation, many disgruntled former team members have anonymously spoken to different outlets about what went wrong.
The Death of Sega’s Hyenas
A number of anonymous developers from Creative Assembly, the team that was working on Hyenas, have come forward to outlets like VGC and the gaming YouTube channel Volound to talk about what ultimately destroyed the game’s chances. A big recurring theme among the many comments is just the game’s lack of any direction. The game reportedly had renowned District 9 and Chappie director Neil Blomkamp onboard at one time to flesh out the world.
“A real shot in the arm… the project so often felt utterly rudderless.”
anonymous developers to Video Games Chronicle
The business side of the game still had no direction, though, and the company floundered back and forth between Hyenas being premium or free-to-play with microtransactions. The latter model is what they had ultimately settled on before the game’s cancelation, and in the amount of time it had taken to finally reach conclusive decisions, Sega had apparently spent more on Hyenas than on any other game in the company’s history. “I’m not angry with Sega for canceling, to be honest,” writes one source, “I firmly believe it only would have lost more money otherwise.”
The actual number Sega spent on Hyenas is unconfirmed, but reports say it was potentially upwards of $80-$100 million. Ultimately, the result is a tragic fate for a game that seemed like it was more interested in riding trends than doing something unique.
