LEAKED: SEGA Attempting to SELL HYENAS to Tencent 

lol

If you didn't say it, I was going to.

you said it all. it really is no wonder people impaled upon that very same stupidity end up wanting to speak out about it. i laugh while reading kids (or just warhammer incels) on forums incredulous at the prospect of leakers speaking out against CA. it perfectly proves that they have paid zero attention to anything at any point, exactly as claimed.

Yeah, this goes beyond the usual corporate laziness and greed. You almost have to try to be this incompetent.

​@@VoloundI've been aware of these problems for years, but said nothing and still say nothing because I don't want to be banned for having a critical opinion. But, I also refuse to be a part of the slanderbus; I simply ask people to be polite, civil and make their own judgement based on evidence, I find CA tends to leave me alone when I take this approach.

the chilling effect in action@@foxdavion6865

​@@VoloundAs you mention the Warhammer incels... I once uploaded a critique a about WH 3 and took it down, because hundreds of them were defending it. Defending beyond any reason. The game was a DLC at best, just like Pharao. The graphics haven't changed since Attila, only the performance got worse. I'm glad someone finally talked about it and gave us some answers.

When the company goes well. The CEO gets a raise. When the company goes badly. The employees are fired.

Don't worry, upper management still got their hefty bonuses I'm sure.

OK, but CA never should've hired that many employees in the first place. A company of that size does not need 800+ employees.

Imo those people dont deserve life. I am not a Total Nut but i still have flashbacks of Rome 2.

Got to pay those rich ceos more

Indeed, a company of 20 or 30 can do amazing things, and luckily they would have to start from scratch as the code is CA property.

How many of these people are actually from Shogun 2 or earlier though? No point in a spiritual successor if they're still participants of the decline era of CA.

Yes, but they might not be interested in medieval combat at all. Modern game development is just an industry where many people are just working on doing textures or animations or whatever, and they don't really have any involvement with what the end result will be.

@@Tom_Quixote You are right, but there might be some older people higher in the company who still care about specific products who could leverage personal respectful relations to some of the people going out to start something new. It's not worth betting money on it though.

The issue is not having the 20-30 talented people. It s to have the money to sustain these 30 peoples for one to two years (let s be honest proably 3 if they need to build a engine)

Not just insight but experience interacting with CA over many years

You could substitute CA for Bungie and it would all make sense. Plus, substitute Sony for Sega. lol

the context is hyenas. HW2 seems pretty successful in comparison. id like to know what misinformation there is though. surely you didnt just mean that one comment about HW2? and ive even got people in brand feeding me stuff at this point but you could probably tell. all the same information controls from your time there are still in place at the company. not that it has helped.

@@Volound A game that was a massive financial flop, killed the planned sequel and effectively ended the "Halo Wars" IP isn't what I'd call successful even when comparing it to Hyenas. Both are just failures, maybe one less so than the other... I guess, but that's not what the person quoted said. They said they 'believe it was somewhat successful because 343 was in control and competent in the direction'. That's just not the case though, they weren't in control (they made the story and reviewed the project as they are the IP owner, but didn't design any gameplay elements) and they weren't very competent clearly because it was a financial flop and killed the franchise anyways. So that's why I felt the need to comment this particular time. Generally I'm seeing "misinformation" that's only very slight, where every leak seems to come attached with what feels like guesswork or editorialization, but one that feeds the overall narrative not just from your channel by the way, I'm not taking any shots at all, its the leakers I'm having *some* issues with. I may have been there from 2015-2017, but I live 5mins away and have friends still there. I know what the next three titles are, I knew there'd be TW layoffs before Hyneas even closed down... and I think because of this extra info I have I get frustrated at the false comparisons drawn between the shutdown of Hyenas and the impact it has on TW. From my understanding there's virtually no correlation between the two, they have separate budgets from SEGA, don't siphon money from one another, and have no bearing on fiscal reports (the idea that Pharaoh was to make up for Hyenas or something is ludicrous for reasons that would take up two more paragraphs here) and yet TW channels love to report on this because it has the name CA attached to it. Which is fine, but its feeding a narrative that isn't the reality inside for the TW teams at least. They actually have a much bigger issue at the moment than Hyenas and I'm waiting to see if anyone will leak the real "danger" TW is facing for its next few titles. But as far as I know, the Sci Fi project is still being developed, the 3rd person unreal engine game is still being developed, and the next 3 TW titles are still going ahead as planned. It is interesting to see employees get to vent their frustrations though and how stupid the decisions for chasing the live service bag have been. That is interesting and good reporting, even if some leaks aren't fully accurate, they mostly are. But I guess I wish people / the community for TW knew that Hyenas isn't really relevant to Historical Games or Warhammer Games.

well, mike simpsons done now apparently. no involvement on hyenas. robs gone. he was there for total war this entire time. nearly 400 people are gone, all in. massive load of total war people are being made redundant and i know that myself just from clicking around linkedin and seeing people with 10-15 years on TW who are losing their jobs now. and this is all so close to hyenas that it isnt a coincidence. warhammer 3 didnt just become completely shite overnight. SEGA gave CA space to fuck up. they fucked up. things are being tightened up now. short leash time. "I expect SEGA to get more involved with CA and intervene more in the upcoming years." - what the person that first told me about rob being sacked (i trust them implicitly) just told me earlier today. hyenas snapped SEGA to attention. clearly.

Unfortunately it is a coincidence. I'm telling you its a coincidence, its not guesswork on my part, it is a coincidence. Total War has a few big ongoing issues right now, that meant they were going to face layoffs regardless of Hyenas. For one, their original Game Director for the next historical game left a few months ago, and has left the project in a bad state. I won't go any further into that. The other issue is the simultaneous development of the next three titles. This is also causing an internal tension. As well as this, many studios around the world are going through periods of layoffs right now. It's a combination of factors, mostly due to bloat and over-hiring during covid. The increase in cashflow is typically spent on investments and employees to lower your tax burden. This is certainly the case for CA. Their teams have ballooned up, and productivity has gone down. Case in point would be the DLC team is 3x its size during Warhammer 1's lifecycle, and yet DLC releases far slower and its sales have been slowing down too. Three Kingdoms 2 was announced in the Future of Three Kingdoms video, but its been quietly cancelled. The issue with the next Historical game has also drawn the ire of SEGA who are apparently much more cutthroat now with CA, whereas before they were very passive. This is for a few reasons, and is happening with companies like Sony and Tencent who are getting more involved with their western studios, because the Yen is massively suffering right now, and they need to cut costs. You're correct that Mike Simpson is retiring, he sent an email about it early in the year and its taken effect just before Hyenas announcement. Anyone who works on TW will tell you he hasn't really been involved with Total War creatively since Shogun 2. He's brilliant though, but I think due to SEGA he never got involved seriously with TW again. Rob B was removed of leadership, but in the email about that to the studio, there was mention he may be taking a role at SEGA. From my understanding, about 10% of TW teams are being let go, mostly in the ancillary areas like marketing, live ops and QA. Marketing has been gutted. @@Volound

wow some interesting things there, and some things i can dig in deeper with to see what else i can find. the rob role at SEGA sounds extremely fishy though. ill be checking that and id advise you maybe to do the same, im assuming you havent seen that email and someone just offhandedly remarked along those lines? either way it sounds off based on what ive seen and heard. its possible i just seriously doubt it and have reasons to. we will see. thanks anyway, i just care about reporting whats apparently true.

I kinda disagree. What we see is people being fired or disgruntled for not "using modern tools". And how those people talk about management and "the old geezers". All who made statements about how long they were in CA said about a decade. Sooo... To put it bluntly, they haven't worked on anything good (Warhammer relies purely on the brand), the first result they could have worked on was Rome 2 Total war, which was an insult. And they are those people who CA brought in in massive hiring sprees. I see young people jumping into CA for a cushioned job, hoping that all the work would be done by the seniors. And than they realize that those "geezers" have no plan themselfes, those who had already left the ship a looong time ago. Instead of a chushioned ride they have to row endlessly and stop the water from leaking into the ship constantly. I do not see any people who would be able to remake such a detailed game as Shogun or Medieval Total War, nor make new progress into Rome, nor refine it in something like Medieval 2. I see a company 800 people strong whos best achievement to fix anything is to simply cut it. No free armies, no population control, single City empires in Warhammer, Doomstacks and Single entity Units, forced army composition... everything to not fix ANY problems.

@@iwankazlow2268 wow that's a lotta words too bad i'm not reading em. 😎

@@iwankazlow2268 too long, but i agree, Total War was playing it too safe/irresponsible (Rome 2) now after Shogun 2

@@iwankazlow2268 yea, I feel CA's modern games have worse mechanic/ gimmick than older games. If it's not for Warhammer fans, TW probably already down long time ago

Might as well have named it Battlenite or Fortgrounds or something, lol.

youre not the only person joking along these lines 🤣

​@@Voloundwell considering Wizards of the Coast sent the god damn Pinkertons after someone, I wouldn't be surprised.

Brand team were hanging out at Nottingham too much; Games Workshop's toxic middle management yuppies had melted their brains.

They now make so much money from their resorts and pacinko machines, I won't be surprised if they just transition to those safe sectors entirely and abandon the video game market, at this point

​​@@lcmiracleSEGA's involvement in the video game sector has been tokenistic for a decade now, doing it mostly out of passion. Rumor has it they plan to sell half their IP to Tencent and the other half to Nintendo. The only thing stopping it are the board and investors being made up of hardcore old school fans. But that same level of love doesn't extend to their western owned IP and studios. I suspect SEGA will pull a Phillips in a decade.

@@lcmiracle Yakuza, Miku and Personas (SMT and other side games not so much) are still bringing them a lot of money not gonna happen any time soon, but they will ditch Creative Assembly like Square Enix did with Crystal Dynamics that's for sure, actually CA situation is much worse since they spend way more money than CD ever did on their games plus all recent titles are financial flops.

It comes down to whether they think Total War will still be a consistent moneymaker or not. Selling Hyenas to TenCent or Nexon would be easier for them to do, especially since it's in UE5. They might get $5 mil back.

@@skywalker6119 The question is the degree CA was deceiving Sega about the viability of Hyenas: consistent money is good, but a management that's taken to hiding serious issues is pretty much a time bomb, and Sega needs to worry about the precedent ignoring such a serious failure will set for its other companies.

As I see it, SEGA corporates stepped in and tried to put a stop at the mismanagement, or at least sent warnings to CA. I dont think the disaster is at corporate level, it seems they gave CA a lot of freedom...

One could Wonder how they even became big in The First place.

@@Legio_Purpura_10_28normoes are impressed by mba’s

many corpos are essentially welfare programs. most people on them don't actually do any work. this is why they screw up like this. because nobody actually does their job.

So like, Sega probably don't really know what's going on with Hyena, then found out recently and decided to pull the plug. Then CA get panic, and all shits go down.

What I was trying to say is that Sega most probably can't sack CA's tops. It's not that they don't want to. They just can't do it legally I think.

@@alexandermedvedev8018So total war is in the hands of greedy corporate idiots.

Ok. From what I see is, while Sega can't intervene in CA internal development, they still can decide how the game being launched. I guess Sega choose to cutloss after calculating the numbers, and seeing how other live service games perform.

I'd bet that Sega wishes that CA bought them out.

what an absolute fucking shitshow

One could see where their "priorities" were. Disgusting wokeists.

Yeah, the dipshit stuffed suits are to blame, not the staff trying to make the game working under that clownshow. A chatbot probably could do a better job spitting out both future plans and handling community outreach than what we've seen from the actual humans at the helm.

Don't agree, have you seen the footage from the game? Somebody had to make that cringe and it wasn't management.

Brits are finished. They havent put out anything worth while in decades and their pm is a poo in loo, LOL

Pharaoh is DOA WARHAMMER 3 is not worth almost $200. The only hope they have is to quickly pay off some mod makers to make a reskin of Attila. Or remaster Shogun in the short term

I expect anyone motivated and competent has already left for a different job.