Relic close to shutting down - not profitable

COH2 has an average of roughly around 120,000 unique players every two weeks.

Source? Or it's utter bullshit

2017 revenue by steam spy.

https://twitter.com/Steam_Spy/status/955603097904173056


Look at DoW3 and TW:WHII sales.

Is it small or big numbers for DOW3 ?

Is it small or big numbers for DOW3 ?

The total sales is not a good number to judge the financial performance. There are 3 reasons why we cannot calculate the potential revenue:

• Games had $30-$40 copies for pre-order on cdkeys/g2a/kinguin.
• Game had multiple sales, including 50% offs.
• Game was in the monthly bundle, where developers of 6 games get share no more than $9 among per bundle. It is very likely that the revenue from those copies was no more than $3 for Sega.

The game bombed. It took 5 years to build, in my previous post I explain how it is reasonable to assume that Relic's operating costs are no less than $10m/year. There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Also, Games Workshop either charges a massive flat fee or some kind of royalties per copy sold.

Even if you give the insanely generous and unrealistic $30 revenue per copy (it is unlikely more than $18 in my estimate), Relic has made less than $17m from the Dawn of War 3 so far. Relic has no additional tools to monetize DoW3. The community has abandoned the game, the game is kind of mediocre, the sequel to DoW3 is financially suicidal.

In conclusion, Sega lost a lot of money funding Relic to build DoW3, because DoW3 was a bomb both financially and killed the franchise.

The total sales is not a good number to judge the financial performance. There are 3 reasons why we cannot calculate the potential revenue:

• Games had $30-$40 copies for pre-order on cdkeys/g2a/kinguin.
• Game had multiple sales, including 50% offs.
• Game was in the monthly bundle, where developers of 6 games get share no more than $9 among per bundle. It is very likely that the revenue from those copies was no more than $3 for Sega.

The game bombed. It took 5 years to build, in my previous post I explain how it is reasonable to assume that Relic's operating costs are no less than $10m/year. There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Also, Games Workshop either charges a massive flat fee or some kind of royalties per copy sold.

Even if you give the insanely generous and unrealistic $30 revenue per copy (it is unlikely more than $18 in my estimate), Relic has made less than $17m from the Dawn of War 3 so far. Relic has no additional tools to monetize DoW3. The community has abandoned the game, the game is kind of mediocre, the sequel to DoW3 is financially suicidal.

In conclusion, Sega lost a lot of money funding Relic to build DoW3, because DoW3 was a bomb both financially and killed the franchise.

Thanks.

To the monetizing thing.
Was paying a few dollars for new units too much ? Yes,it should have been inside the game all along which
costs 20$ max.

Ok, the attitude with superimbalanced units was extremely stupid or felt out of context (old ace ...),
but now when playing with guys who had their stock vanilla armies from the bundle. I must say, i like my Pershing.

To AOE4
Was never a real fan of AOE, but Relic games are always kind of special in their own way.
But we have to face it they were never really popular games, so please Relic don't f*ck up!
I would love to be suprised even with an AOE title.

DOW3
The DOW3 story is a bit of tragic.
I personally really enjoyed it a lot, one of the problems was ...it was a warhammer game, means warhammer nerds fans with their view on the game.

Aaaand smeone should take away the C&C licence from EA and make a great game! (miss you cnc generals...)


But all in all the future still speaks CoH. Theese kind of balance cycles we have now can keep it alive for a longer time than anticipated.
We rant, but still play it don't we?

they could make a vcoh coh online conversion for the lulz and call it coh blitz captain super krieg ...voila you have something weird, but it was really ...really fun.

AOE4 will be very good and COH3 will be great, you will see (hope very soon).
Relic will go down to history as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) RTS Studios ever

With the trend of RTS slowly disappearing, they'll be the only RTS studio left, and by definition, the greatest and the best.

The total sales is not a good number to judge the financial performance. There are 3 reasons why we cannot calculate the potential revenue:

• Games had $30-$40 copies for pre-order on cdkeys/g2a/kinguin.
• Game had multiple sales, including 50% offs.
• Game was in the monthly bundle, where developers of 6 games get share no more than $9 among per bundle. It is very likely that the revenue from those copies was no more than $3 for Sega.

The game bombed. It took 5 years to build, in my previous post I explain how it is reasonable to assume that Relic's operating costs are no less than $10m/year. There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Also, Games Workshop either charges a massive flat fee or some kind of royalties per copy sold.

Even if you give the insanely generous and unrealistic $30 revenue per copy (it is unlikely more than $18 in my estimate), Relic has made less than $17m from the Dawn of War 3 so far. Relic has no additional tools to monetize DoW3. The community has abandoned the game, the game is kind of mediocre, the sequel to DoW3 is financially suicidal.

In conclusion, Sega lost a lot of money funding Relic to build DoW3, because DoW3 was a bomb both financially and killed the franchise.

+1
"There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega."


Yes, user acquisition are important to keep in mind but I think Sega wanted to put a lot of this on the shoulders of Relic as they have done with CA that has internal marketing/branding teams.
In old COH2.ORG interview game director talked about this;
https://www.coh2.org/news/4977/quinn-duffy-post-launch-interview

Quinn Duffy: I do really like the way Sega approaches their development. They want Relic to be a craft-led studio, managing our own creative process and having more ownership of the game from beginning to end, including areas typically outside traditional development, like PR or marketing.

This means that Relic has to grow – we don’t have these positions internally. We’ve been building up the studio slowly hiring metrics analysts and our new GM who will lead a lot of the future efforts. But the independence is very interesting and challenging – Relic needs to make money, and we need to find the ways to do that while building our games, building relationships with the community, and making our games better all the time.

As one of the longest-standing and largest UK studios, Creative Assembly’s craft-led approach to games development has been the studio’s key foundation, and the driving-force behind our culture.

https://www.creative-assembly.com/blog/uks-leading-games-development-studio

From a fan perspective, I think Fantomasas analysis is pretty spot on. I hope more informed fans like you will stick around to provide community feedback. I have a bad feeling, Relic will need all the help they can get if CoH3 are to succeed financially. I sincerely hope Relic learn something from it's sister studio Amplitude and provide early CoH3 access so we can help hold their feet to the fire. No more Relic secret service.

From 2016/2015 roadmap (delayed almost a year, I lost count how many times Kyle had to apologize for this);

http://www.companyofheroes.com/blog/2016/12/09/coh2-the-road-ahead
Moving forward, we would like to be as transparent as possible when it comes to what you can expect regarding COH2’s ongoing support and future updates.

Even Quinn Duffy own kids don't like all the Relic secrecy.

CoH fans waiting for Relic transparency;

It's obvious the CMs don't have sufficiently high priority/ranking within Relic and are not allowed to talk about much or kept in the loop at all. This unintentionally make them look either stupid and/or not caring.
CoH has now been without any official CM for at least 4+ months. No announcements from Relic.
So what's going on at Relic? Why the radio silence?


In comparison, the community leader (Craig) from CA Total War get promoted/hired as SEGA brand manager.
This is CA transparency;
What The Teams Are Working On 07-06-17
https://www.totalwar.com/blog/what-the-teams-are-working-on-07-06-17

What it’s like to manage a gaming community on fire
http://www.pcgamer.com/what-its-like-to-manage-a-gaming-community-on-fire/.

Sanya Weathers was hired off an EverQuest rant site to serve as the CM for an upstart MMO called Dark Age of Camelot. She was paid very, very little money, but dived into the gig headfirst. “I am not sure if I’m the first in the games industry to treat this job like relationship building, but I was at least in the first wave,” she says.

“I learned very quickly that my biggest weakness and my biggest strength was missing the forest for the trees. That is the main thing that causes anger and frustration for players,” continues Weathers. “What sounds like constant moaning is actually a hundred different complaints when you zoom in closer, and almost all of the issues can be handled by giving more information, by including people in the bigger picture. So I don't get numb to it, because I'm right there in the trees with my players. I can then take that feeling and use my privileged access to get the whole story and share it.”

Community Management - The Unsung Heroes of the Game Industry


Fortunately for CoH fans, Sega today is a stronger publisher than they were when CoH2 was released. Games like Persona 5 which is owned by Sega/Sammy right now is a flagship for Atlus/Sega of America. Right now, Persona 5 has more twitch viewers than popular online games like WoT and Heroes of the Storm. This is important because the leaders behind Atlus played a key role to inspire Sega top leaders to take the fan community more seriously. This eventual "inspired" Sega CEO to give an open apology for "betraying fans" in 2015;

In an interview with Famitsu translated by Siliconera, Sega CEO Hajime Satomi conceded some of the company’s releases over the past decade have eroded trust with longtime fans.

GamesBeat: And then Sega also owns role-playing game master studio Atlus. Persona 5 is a big success story this year. Has Atlus exceeded expectations for Sega?

Clark: Whether we can say it’s overperforming or performing to expectations, we’re really delighted with Persona 5. Everyone across the Sega organization is proud to be able to say that we were part of that, however big or small a part each individual played. Persona 5 is a flagship brand for Sega coming from Atlus now. It’s very strong. We appreciate that. We talked before about the connection with the community, identifying the uniqueness of the community. That’s embodied in the Atlus titles, particularly Persona.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/14/how-sega-found-its-third-party-identity-with-pc-gaming-atlus-and-its-classics/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-clark-8b060614/

Lol I think dark times comes:
They already lost since aoe 4 these leads:
Principal Artist Ian Cumming - Left in this january
- 15 yrs at relic
Lead Environment Artist Ian Guise - Left in this January - 13 yrs at relic
Lead Concept Artist David T. Cheong - Left this January - 20+ yrs at relic
Lead AI and Gameplay Engineer Anthony Bergelt - left studio in october 2017, about 9 yrs at relic
Important Generalist Programmer that make many thing for Essence - Michel Schmidt - left studio in october 2017 - 13 yrs at relic
Senior Core Gamepaly Designer - Damon Gauthier - left studio in August 2017 - 13 yrs at relic.
WTF? Why so many relic veterans so fats in less half a year left studio?

It's worth noting there's no management in that list.

yeah, if you have read between the lines in community managers posts in the last years, it becomes pretty obvious that relic has a problem with the management. Although i find it pretty interesting that this didnt change after the dow3 disaster!

To the outside world, nothing has changed. It does not mean that nothing has changed internally!

+1
"There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega.

Yes, user acquisition are important to keep in mind but I think Sega wanted to put a lot of this on the shoulders of Relic as they have done with CA that has internal marketing/branding teams.
In old COH2.ORG interview game director talked about this;

Fortunately for CoH fans, Sega today is a stronger publisher than they were when CoH2 was released. Games like Persona 5 which is owned by Sega/Sammy right now is a flagship for

The costs I was talking about were more like trade-shows, promotional materials (Cinematic trailer was made by Axis), website ad-space, youtube air-time, sponsoring/organizing online events. For CoH2, that would include live-action commercials or paying ESL for the token-esports season.

I don't think that Sega is interested in running Relic if they cannot be profitable working on the biggest RTS IPs in the world. Relic isn't the type of studio which can work on Sega's IPs: it is primarily a PC RTS developer, they have already ruined the DoW IP financially, it remains to be seen how AoE performs. Relic has no options to sell to the console market which is where AAA money is. The PC sales for Wolfenstein II are similar to DoW3, yet the game is much more financially viable because it is released on PS4 and XBO to triple the total number of sales, the Switch port is also a possibility. Depending on the publishing agreement, if AoE fails to deliver on expectations, I don't think that there will be a Sega-published CoH3. It is very likely that Sega would either close or allow the studio to go independent (like Square Enix did with IO Interactive, allowing them to keep the IP).

DoW3 has been bundled with the hardware (Anything Asus including routers, then another Intel processor promotion). So you can add one more bullet point to the reasons why the total number of copies activated isn't a good indication of the financial success.

as far as i'm aware no manager has gone or has been fire, which would be the the only reasonable step to change things internally

After reading this thread well... seems it's gonna be hard to get CoH 3 .

Just found this one lol. First off: This isn't anywhere near surprising. RTS experienced a pretty harsh decline for years now and when you combine it with some serious fuckups you simply wreck the ship.

What does concern me though is, that these Problems seem to be present for quite some time and up until now nobody has talked about it and it just now has been brought into daylight.

On the bottom note: I am 99.9% sure the major fuck-ups weren't necessairly on Relic's side.

RELIC is watching us!

Well, too bad. I wish good luck to Relic with their games in futures and long life. Even when they failed with DoW3 that mean nothing. I believe they still can make great games.

RELIC is watching us!

They were watching this thread 18 hrs ago, and of course, they don't even have to log in to read it, so it is a courtesy by them when they do log in to read.

The total sales is not a good number to judge the financial performance. There are 3 reasons why we cannot calculate the potential revenue:

• Games had $30-$40 copies for pre-order on cdkeys/g2a/kinguin.
• Game had multiple sales, including 50% offs.
• Game was in the monthly bundle, where developers of 6 games get share no more than $9 among per bundle. It is very likely that the revenue from those copies was no more than $3 for Sega.

The game bombed. It took 5 years to build, in my previous post I explain how it is reasonable to assume that Relic's operating costs are no less than $10m/year. There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Also, Games Workshop either charges a massive flat fee or some kind of royalties per copy sold.

Even if you give the insanely generous and unrealistic $30 revenue per copy (it is unlikely more than $18 in my estimate), Relic has made less than $17m from the Dawn of War 3 so far. Relic has no additional tools to monetize DoW3. The community has abandoned the game, the game is kind of mediocre, the sequel to DoW3 is financially suicidal.

In conclusion, Sega lost a lot of money funding Relic to build DoW3, because DoW3 was a bomb both financially and killed the franchise.

I liked this post a lot. Good points and I dig the intellectual level when it comes to presenting data and points.