"We're making sure the product is where it needs to be": Hyenas dev addresses free-to-play reports

SEGA may not be a publisher known for shooters, but the upcoming space heist title Hyenas looks promising from our preview.

With SEGA's investor Q&A revealing that the game has been a "challenging title" (thanks, VGC), and that the publisher is also "making final adjustments to its business model in parallel" with "striving to improve [Hyenas'] quality", we tried to put the record straight with Live Product Director Alex Hunnisett at Gamescom 2023.

Will Hyenas be free-to-play?

Asked whether the game will launch as a free-to-play title, Hunnisett had this to say.

"Honestly, at the moment we're focusing on beta.

"What me and my team care about is making sure the game mode and the product itself is where it needs to be," he explained.

"I think like business model really gets informed by when the game mode is what we want it to be at the end of that period, and then we set that."

What we know about Hyenas' progression systems

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Given the differences in progression systems between free-to-play and fully priced games, that may sound like a worry, but Hunnisett is confident on the mechanisms that'll keep players looting in Hyenas.

"We've got kind of our in-match progression or out-of-match progression," Hunnisett reveals.

"In a match, you'll be able to get kind of strongest shields, we have a whole array of different gadgets you can use."

"Then you've got your out-of-match progression, which is the loop of going in, grabbing this merch and getting out.

"If you get out that merch successively, it's all about what you want to do with it, so thematically, you are gonna go back to the orbital slum that everybody lives in, and you can do one or two things," Hunnisett explains.

"You can sell it and get coins which you can use to buy customization for your character, or you can effectively donate it as a way to up your reputation, which is your progression."

You can find out more about Hyenas by checking out the game's closed beta, coming soon on Steam.