Hey I thought I'd wade in here again and help clear things up. There seems to be some historical revisionism going on and I'm hoping that it's just a case of people being confused as opposed to individuals wanting to create some pointless drama.
The decision to move Company of Heroes off of our previous server hosts Quazal was made by Ubisoft when they bought the server company. They did not want to be in the business of supporting other company's games and gave us a deadline for when they'd shut down our servers.
Long time players may remember that at a certain point the CoH servers stopped being as reliable as they had been. As our playerbase grew, and CoH's player numbers continued to grow until the server shutdown, our uptime lessened and there would be long patches where the game would go offline. It's nice to remember that the servers never had issues, but that's not the case.
At the point where we got the notice that the servers would be shut down we were owned by THQ. THQ at that time were in the business of making blockbusters. Space Marine was to be the next Gears of War. Homefront was going to be the next Call of Duty. The idea of investing what little available cash they had on supporting a game that was approaching it's 10 year anniversary didn't make sense to them. We argued for it, but ultimately it's their money to decide how they want to spend it.
When SEGA bought us following THQ's bankruptcy we outlined the situation and explained how important it was to the studio to keep supporting CoH. There's a lot of publishers who would have balked at being asked for money to support a game that they didn't release and whose initial profits they didn't get. It's absolutely to SEGA's credit that they agreed with Relic that it was important to continue the legacy of CoH and not close it down.
That was the alternative.
Company of Heroes would have closed down, gone offline for good.
Instead we invested time and effort into moving it to Steam. We didn't have as much time as we wanted to spend doing it, because of Ubisoft's imposed deadline, and we had lost a lot of time under THQ which would have helped us. The team was also focused on shipping Company of Heroes 2, and thankfully SEGA gave us more time to do that as well as the ship date for CoH 2 was moved back.
We met the deadline, we kept CoH alive. And again to SEGA's credit they never tried to release the game. They didn't say, "Well let's close CoH and then release it in a few months as CoH HD and charge everyone for it again."
Which some publishers would have done.
They kept the game alive so that the millions of people who own it could continue to play it.
We worked hard to get the game as solid as we could despite moving to extremely different server architecture on Steamworks. We knew we wouldn't be able to keep the game 100% the same, or with the full feature set at launch. Producer Greg Wilson outlined the issues here:
http://community.companyofheroes.com/forums/community-news-feed/topics/Company-of-Heroes-Steamworks-feature-set
We then worked with the community to identify more issues, feeding back their issues to the external development team at Smoking Gun Interactive did a lot of this work and continue to work with us. A lot of the original CoH team are at Smoking Gun so they have a deep knowledge of the game's internals and have been valuable partners in this.
We understand people are passionate about the game, because we are.
The community has been incredibly helpful and supportive during this process. A lot of stuff that's going to be fixed is being fixed only because members of the community were able to provide constructive and helpful feedback to us on what issues they were experiencing. We want to continue that!
So hopefully this has cleared things up a bit. I want to again thank you all who have worked with us to improve things and we hope to have some positive news for you in the near future.
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
