Profile of Vermillion_Hawk

That's just plain stupid since there are plenty of media, and specifically games (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind) which critique America, even or especially in its modern incarnation. It's not uncommon to have America or any Western government framed as a morally-ambiguous or outright hostile entity in many, many different cultural contexts. You'll even see World War II movies that have a lot to say about the failings of the Allies. The real reason why there's a big difference between the reactions to these kinds of stories and the reaction to Company of Heroes 2's campaign is because, for all its failings (which I am more than happy to speak of, basically unprompted), America is not a tinpot dictatorship that gaslights its citizens into believing an attack on the state and its various apparatuses is an attack on their personal identity. It's the same reason why people don't talk about the Armenian Genocide in front of Turkish people. And it's pathetic.

The disgusting Soviet campaign is enough once.

What was so disgusting about it? Modern Russia's even doing the same shit right now.

I don't think so at the moment, I just wanted to include the worst possible outcome since also Cobra mentioned it.
Look at DoW3: the game was economically a complete failure (albeit technically in a better state) and in player numbers way worse than CoH3. Relic dropped it after 10 months. I wouldn't expect Relic to drop CoH3 in the next months. As long as plaErs stay, they can make money, and they will develop the game.
They might downscale their plans though if they don't see enough people coming back.
Obviously it is possible that support could completely cease, but I would be highly suprised at current player count. In the future maybe, but not in the next months.

Here's the thing about Dawn of War III - player retention was not nearly as bad of an issue as it seems, at least in terms of the immediate comparison to Company of Heroes 3. It averaged around 1000-1500 players regularly (which Company of Heroes 3 is currently nosediving to), and it had some 6000 return for the Annihilation update, which also came with free extra content. The lows attained after that can be attributed to Relic's announcement of straight-up murdering the game. So it's not like the community wasn't paying attention to the game - if anything the situation is eerily similar to what we have going on right now.

What made it a real economic failure? The Skulls system. This drew a mix of praise and ire in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the release, but basically, the plan was to have an in-game shop where Relic stated that everything (up to and including new factions, according to at least one post from Relic) would be purchasable with the earnable in-game currency, which you could also buy in packs from the Steam storefront. Like most good Relic ideas, it came out half-baked - you could earn Skulls for most of the first months of the game, and the amounts you got from just playing the game made the purchasable packs irrelevant. I can't remember if it was killed before or during the Annihilation update, but essentially the system was excised completely, probably for one particular reason - it's not exploitatively profitable. It was even more liberal than Company of Heroes 2's system, which was nascent itself at the time. The decision to take the game behind the shed and shoot it did not come far behind, predictably.

Fast forward to Company of Heroes 3, and the monetization scheme has definitely become more exploitative, spurred, no doubt, by the relative success of microtransactions in Company of Heroes 2. We're already almost done with the PR cycle whereby they release the in-game store, people react accordingly, predatory behaviour is gradually normalized, etcetera. Relic can't help but do things half-baked and half-blind, though, and, I think, have failed to account for the fact that Company of Heroes 2 makes money off of microtransactions mostly because it's a game people actually want to play, with a thriving multiplayer scene. Putting the microtransaction store in the game several years into its lifespan was a stroke of unwitting genius on Relic's part, actually, and you'll see very few people complaining over that particular system, generally because they're satisfied with the state of the game.

People called Dawn of War III an attempt at a quick cash-in on a half-baked property, and I think that's probably partially true - it was definitely not given the time to marinade that it needed, although it was an INFINITELY superior game at launch to what we're currently looking at. Thing is, I see the same symptoms here - and I see it going equally poorly, what with Relic already (unsuccessfully) trying to curry favour by walking back the scale of predatory microtransactions. The damage has already been done, though, and I can guarantee that with a customization option missing from launch and paltry offerings in the initial stage of its rollout, coupled with the game being, you know, shit, the in-game store is probably just not making the money that the C-suite people want to see.

Now, Company of Heroes does have a few things going for it that Dawn of War doesn't - for one, Warhammer fans are notoriously persnickety, and there was a concerted effort to trash the game on aesthetics alone (not totally unjustified but alas) before it was even playable, among other things. Company of Heroes is easier to attract average people to, being based in a setting common across genres, and has both diehard fans and Nazi enthusiasts as committed customers (Relic, somewhat ironically, has alienated the latter with the Rommel bait-and-switch, something hilarious worthy of an analysis all to itself). I can't know what's going on at Relic - I have no insider information. I do know, however, how the C-suite operates, since the sole purpose of an MBA (and a corporation in general) is basically to make you a predictable component. And if the higher-ups were more than willing to torch their longest-running RTS series, I can easily see it happening to their second-longest-running. Keep in mind that the difference in initial sales success is offset by the vastly increased overhead at the Relic of 2023 compared to 2017. I'd like to say that I hope I'm wrong but I'll probably be happy if this game, and Relic in general, die completely, in the hopes that someone will step up to fill the void with something actually worth playing.

I never once in that video did any of the things you're stating, so maybe stop arguing with yourself?

You're trying to sell people on the idea that the game is going to get better. Everything else is implicit in that.

Oh boy, Zeal again. Because the game needs extra incentive to blob.