Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired

Looks like Relic de-diversified quickly.
Sega has apparently decided that CoH3 has too little players to support a company of Relic's size. Which obviously means they don't deem CoH3 very profitable in the short to mid term. This is a big hit to development, if not the last nail in the coffin.

Again the community can stand up to save the day. Just open up the mod. so we can mod merge the both game into one hell of war experience ! Coh2 was save, it can be done again !

Somehow I doubt that the layoffs will hit the people it should, which were the project managers and people above them. Several of my immediate family are programmers. I hear their side of stories like this when they happen, which usually happens when the project manager doesn't understand everything that needs to happen to deliver a successful product.

In this case, there is no way that they developed the scope or work breakdown structure correctly, as there is no indication that they realized what features should be in a competitive RTS.

They also skipped on the QA/QC and testing with too many examples to note.

Lastly, it doesn't seem like they had a solid project plan at any point, and should've just released two factions, Wehr or Dak and Brits, and one campaign. By spreading themselves too thin and deciding to release at a given date regardless of state, they made sure that the product was bad.

Expected. If your employees shit the bed, and label themselves as successful, you have to clean the house yourself. The only hope is that it is the unskilled fat and managers who are being trimmed, and not the actual developers.

It is going to get DOW3'ed. Keep in mind there weren't mass layoffs after DOW3, while we aren't even in the console launch of COH3 and the heads are already rolling.

Somehow I doubt that the layoffs will hit the people it should, which were the project managers and people above them. Several of my immediate family are programmers. I hear their side of stories like this when they happen, which usually happens when the project manager doesn't understand everything that needs to happen to deliver a successful product.

You are probably right on this one, simply because to restructure and layoff the low-productivity employees you need to send in some outside/independent HR agents: to inspect reports, interview employees, gather feedback, write their own reports on productivity/quality/risks of the studio.

It cannot be a snap decision, because if it is: then it is the Relic management who caused the problems in the first place: low-productivity + low-quality output.

Again the community can stand up to save the day. Just open up the mod. so we can mod merge the both game into one hell of war experience ! Coh2 was save, it can be done again !

People told you in your thread how idiotic the idea that you can just merge both games is, and instead of changing your point of view, you still suggesting it.

Looks like Relic de-diversified quickly.
Sega has apparently decided that CoH3 has too little players to support a company of Relic's size. Which obviously means they don't deem CoH3 very profitable in the short to mid term. This is a big hit to development, if not the last nail in the coffin.

While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me.

We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with.

Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio

People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left

That's like saying a lobotomy patient still has most of their brain left. We can go back and forth here about known unknowns and unknown unknowns but ultimately the future of this game is going to come down to pure financial expediency. This is an obvious sign that Company of Heroes 3 underperformed to a severe degree - the next step will be shutting down Relic for good, and I suspect this will likely be before the end of the year, since even with nearly 500 employees, the company was clearly unable to juggle the demands placed on it. Don't kid yourself and think the game doesn't need a massive amount of work and spit polish - if you have low standards that doesn't translate to the majority that will decide the game's future.

You can have false hope, but don't even try to defend that position. It's untenable by any metric.

While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me.

We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with.

Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio

People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left

Good points - If they're not working on any new projects, they certainly need a lot less employees. Also, the 17(?) year long history of the series tells Relic that most of us aren't going to another game any time soon.

Good points - If they're not working on any new projects, they certainly need a lot less employees. Also, the 17(?) year long history of the series tells Relic that most of us aren't going to another game any time soon.

I mean I've essentially left coh franchise after playing coh2 for so long and been there for coh3 launch.

Foxhole, aoe4, TFT, WoT, War Thunder have caught my interest instead.

I mean, just look at the people streaming coh2/3 these days, often I only see a handful of streams with 3-5 viewers, a lot of coh streamers also moved on to different games instead of 100% coh these days.

While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me.

We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with.

Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio

People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left

One of the key things you're missing is that the game is marketed as a "Live Service". In order for a live service to work, you need constant and frequent content. As you can see from the experience of many failed live service games, one studio is not enough for a live service. And then the reduction of the staff of the studio.
We all know perfectly well what will happen to most of the service's games - they are stillborn or receive just the bare minimum content, even less than just DLC. To maintain a live service sometimes you need two or three studios.

And this is deserved at least in a bigger context. CoH3 is failing only because of the people involved in its development, every technical aspect would have been overlooked even by haters if the game got proper maintaining.

Think about that.

Console ports are outsourced in most of the cases. Even huge companies like sony and so on, usually are outsourcing their porting. + Relic is known to use outsourcing, CoH port as an example.

Developer (tech developers to be precise) usually consist of a smart ass guys, who are more often then not will make your game work, have your engine working and move to another project with-in company\studio.

So what we are left with is basically - art team (models\textures\assets), coding team (which do simple stuff usually), game\gameplay team (who are related to the game itself) and different sorts of management.

CoH3 is a success on a technical level. It runs good, system requirements are low and the game is over-all very stable. So tech guys did their job really good.

What about everyone else tho? Ok art team did a good job, animations, 3D models and textures were good. 2D art team is a shit.

Coding team, core is good. Everything past that is garbage, requiring huge amouts of tunning. Things like units responsiveness, features like player names and so on.

Gameplay team ... again 50\50 job.

What I am trying to say, CoH3 feels like this game was made by freelancers, who actually did their job really good, then gave the product to Relic to fine-tune and finish and Relic failed miserably to do so.

There are no justification, nor logical explanation why game-studio with 300 employees (even lets imagine CoH3 had like 100-150 employees fully dedicated to CoH3 from start till now), doing so bad.

Even having 10 people in each gameplay, design, balance, coding, art categories of dev team, can solve almost all problem with-in a couple of weeks.

But its not happening. It would have made sense if Relic was an indie dev studio, with like 20 guys, where single guy is a mapper, moddeler and coder. He just cant do everything at the same time. Yet even indie devs usually show better results.

So yeah, I really hope, someone who will be fired tell the world about whats happening in the kitchen.

Because right now its just doesnt make any logical sense, like at all, zero, why company with such amount of employees, doing everything so poorly and slow on their MAIN title, which CAN be a monopolist without any competitors in a WW2 RTS setting.

I thought to join relic to microsoft could cause different drastic or bad decisions to lead and decide in the coh franchise and others. Sad this lay off of this employers and for the community of this franchise.

While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me.

We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with.

Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio

People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left

Yes, the studio was surely bloated. Yet, kicking out a third/quarter (whatever the number of Relic employees currently is) of your employees is never a good sign. Judging by the game's problems, features and Relic's communication, a lot is mismanagement of the studio, which means Relic would need to exchange at least leading positions in the company. This is speculation of course, but I think a somewhat founded one. But kicking out 121 people is not kicking out the management. I guess those people save their ass and it is smaller staff that has to go, so the core issues will likely stay unresolved.
Relic wasn't able to get CoH3 ready for launch with their previous employees, they didn't get much done between the betas and launch, nor launch and today. Relic won't suddenly have a faster pace by downsizing significantly.

The mass layoff could be expected after finishing a game. You obviously need way less people to maintain and update content than to development from scratch. But coh3 is not done and Relic knows this. Yet, they have to kick out a huge part of their staff.
The most likely conclusion is that Relic was in financial trouble before, had to rush the release of CoH3 (or management ignored the state in order to cash in for their reports), the game got its deserved mixed reviews which is worse than what Relic would have needed. They then released the shop to rake in more revenue, which made the situation worse. Players were dropping and so did the economic expectations for coh3, at which point they made the odd survey and also the decision that the current size is unsustainable given the expected revenue from the game, so a huge part of the employees got fired.
Since I doubt that these people are the ones responsible for all of the failures, I don't see why things will improve from here. Development will go even slower than right now.
At the very very least, Relic teams will go through a huge restructuring process that will likely put output to zero for the next weeks. This coincides with the console release, and will also not help to rebuild the player base (unless the next patch is great, which I doubt given the preview).

This was expected and is fully deserved after they delivered a puke called "CoH3". I do feel bad for the people who were let go, but let's be honest - CoH3 is a disappointment at almost every level, from its strategic direction to little things like attention to detail. They messed it up in pretty much every department, so the collective guilt is very relevant in this case and so the layoffs are logical. SEGA had to clean the house.

What does it mean for COH3? We will see, but it cannot be good. I see some people in this thread have already started taking copium, but the reality is - COH3 is not a good game to begin with. I am not sure it can be saved, but if it can be saved, it needs MORE developers to work on it, not LESS. What is going to happen to it now, that Relic has been downsized? I don't think it will be abandoned tomorrow, but the fact that this topic is brought up after only 3 months after release says a lot.

From my dealings with Relic, it always seemed to be the higher ups that made weird decisions that fucked stuff up.

I feel like COH3 had the budget to make a single player game OR a multiplayer game but they decided to make a game with both modes that were half assed.

Of course, those people are probably safe in their positions.

And this is deserved at least in a bigger context. CoH3 is failing only because of the people involved in its development, every technical aspect would have been overlooked even by haters if the game got proper maintaining.

Think about that.

Console ports are outsourced in most of the cases. Even huge companies like sony and so on, usually are outsourcing their porting. + Relic is known to use outsourcing, CoH port as an example.

Developer (tech developers to be precise) usually consist of a smart ass guys, who are more often then not will make your game work, have your engine working and move to another project with-in company\studio.

So what we are left with is basically - art team (models\textures\assets), coding team (which do simple stuff usually), game\gameplay team (who are related to the game itself) and different sorts of management.

CoH3 is a success on a technical level. It runs good, system requirements are low and the game is over-all very stable. So tech guys did their job really good.

What about everyone else tho? Ok art team did a good job, animations, 3D models and textures were good. 2D art team is a shit.

Coding team, core is good. Everything past that is garbage, requiring huge amouts of tunning. Things like units responsiveness, features like player names and so on.

Gameplay team ... again 50\50 job.

What I am trying to say, CoH3 feels like this game was made by freelancers, who actually did their job really good, then gave the product to Relic to fine-tune and finish and Relic failed miserably to do so.

There are no justification, nor logical explanation why game-studio with 300 employees (even lets imagine CoH3 had like 100-150 employees fully dedicated to CoH3 from start till now), doing so bad.

Even having 10 people in each gameplay, design, balance, coding, art categories of dev team, can solve almost all problem with-in a couple of weeks.

But its not happening. It would have made sense if Relic was an indie dev studio, with like 20 guys, where single guy is a mapper, moddeler and coder. He just cant do everything at the same time. Yet even indie devs usually show better results.

So yeah, I really hope, someone who will be fired tell the world about whats happening in the kitchen.

Because right now its just doesnt make any logical sense, like at all, zero, why company with such amount of employees, doing everything so poorly and slow on their MAIN title, which CAN be a monopolist without any competitors in a WW2 RTS setting.

This gave me a little chuckle, this is not how game development teams are structured.

Anyway, it is unfortunate to see people lose their jobs. And like I said in my other post, making video games is very difficult (despite what people believe), many games have rough launches, and plenty that never make it to the public and this can be for many reasons, sadly a minority of the public tends to lean into bassless/uneducated assumptions and stupid conspiracy theory.

Console ports are outsourced in most of the cases. Even huge companies like sony and so on, usually are outsourcing their porting. + Relic is known to use outsourcing, CoH port as an example.

Gabby or John confirmed that the console port is outsourced under the guidance of Relic. I think it was either Reddit or their official forums.

Expected. If your employees shit the bed, and label themselves as successful, you have to clean the house yourself. The only hope is that it is the unskilled fat and managers who are being trimmed, and not the actual developers.

It is going to get DOW3'ed. Keep in mind there weren't mass layoffs after DOW3, while we aren't even in the console launch of COH3 and the heads are already rolling.



You are probably right on this one, simply because to restructure and layoff the low-productivity employees you need to send in some outside/independent HR agents: to inspect reports, interview employees, gather feedback, write their own reports on productivity/quality/risks of the studio.

It cannot be a snap decision, because if it is: then it is the Relic management who caused the problems in the first place: low-productivity + low-quality output.



People told you in your thread how idiotic the idea that you can just merge both games is, and instead of changing your point of view, you still suggesting it.

Still the best option.

This gave me a little chuckle, this is not how game development teams are structured.

Enlighten me how its structured then. Its a basic pyramid from start to bottom, just like any other team. You have your big bosses, down to senior employees in different departments.

Usually for games its art department, tech department and "gameplay" departement and so on. With a variations and sub departments, but it still comes to the fact that, no matter how you look at it "hard" part of the game was done exceptionally good.

Hardest part of any gamedev is actually creating basics of the game. Be it work with the engine, coding and assets. Maintaining the game is super easy, unless its poorly made in its core, which is not the case for CoH3.

So we have a bunch of smart guys in the art department who decided that re-using assets and making half-finished art is acceptable.

We have guys in the tech department, who decided that including basics spectate mode, player names, proper color, fine-tunning pathing and so on is not needed.

We have guys in a gameplay\game department who thought that its alright to ignore all the feedback during alphas\betas, to later be surprised that it requires fixes.

On maybe it was management, who said all of this is not a priority. Then what are thous 300 people were doing exactly? It was proven by modders\fans that at least minor things like spec mod and icons take very little time to make, yet, either employees are not motivated to stand up against idiotic management and say that thing is needed or they just dont care about the project, so they wont lift a finger unless asked. Maybe both.

And they don't use some sacred alien technology either. Mappers use the same world builder to make maps, art team uses the same "photoshop" or other programs to make UI assets, balance team uses the files and bakes them as the players who mod the game. Why everything is happening so slow then or not happening at all?

So unless management has approach of "if not in a scope don't even dare to touch it" and employees have approach of "if I am not specifically asked to do it, then I wont do it", I don't see how game ended up in such state.

I have no hope left, this is the end of CoH, imo. At least, I do not know any positive examples how studios(or even software development companies in general) overcome such issues. Only thing I can imagine for this game to live if they let community mod freely.

Just look at WC3, absolutely the same. And one guy there (wc3champions) managed to make his own ladder with matchmaking and ranks system, add and balance maps, add custom modes into matchmaking, etc. While whole Blizzard delivered nothing but downgrades. Fucking shitshow.

Please, just let the game live, Lelic, let us manage it ourselves

I have no hope left, this is the end of CoH, imo. At least, I do not know any positive examples how studios(or even software development companies in general) overcome such issues. Only thing I can imagine for this game to live if they let community mod freely.

I've seen layoffs like that first hand, 20% of company was let go(the publisher I worked at), they fucked suddenly 100 people while boasting about great financial situation just weeks earlier.

Most of the people who were let go found much better jobs relatively fast, publisher itself also changed direction a bit and are doing ok now. Tho people who remained had massive workloads for quite some time.

Shortly after I've decided to look for greener pastures, because it wasn't 1st layoff and I wasn't going to wait and find if they are going to go for 3rd one or not, they have proven to be irresponsible at top level.