Sega recently cancelled Creative Assembly’s online shooter Hyenas and commenced layoffs at the UK studio, but has now stated the “game itself was good.”

Opining on its restructuring plans during its (now translated) Q2 results presentation, the Japanese publisher suggested the now-scrapped project wasn’t necessarily in a bad place, but claims it lacked the credentials for long term success.

“To put it simply, Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre, but they took on the challenge of developing Hyenas, an online game in the FPS genre,” wrote the studio.

“However, although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel the development of Hyenas because we did not think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users when we considered whether we could really operate this as a competitive online game for a long period of time.”

Hyenas was cancelled at the end of September, just over a year after it was announced. The project was pitched as a hero-based extraction shooter, but was abruptly axed just two weeks after concluding a closed beta test on PC.

At the time, Sega indicated the project was scrapped as part of a wider initiative focused on improving profitability. The company later confirmed it would be laying off workers at developer Creative Assembly.

The Hyenas maker said developers “poured their hearts” into the project for years and explained that accepting the cancellation hadn’t been easy. “We are so sorry to announce the end of Hyenas’ development before we were ever able to bring our full vision to you,” it added in a statement.

Sega is currently consulting with Creative Assembly employees as it works to reduce the studio’s headcount. The company has also confirmed it chose to cancel the development of other unannounced titles alongside Hyenas.