Profile of Prostruppen Ready

By the way, CA has said that they aren't planning to do a 3rd medieval on their subreddit.

I suspected Relic wanted to delay the 2017 release date and SEGA said no. Total Warhammer 2 have 3½ months preorder (TW Warhammer 1 had 6 months), DoW3 had less than 2 months.
Moving a scheduled release date is very expensive and Relic underestimated how much time/money needed to complete the game. With all the money SEGA is making from Total Warhammer I doubt they wanted DoW3 to be terrible for fans.
With low player activity and 53% user reviews on Steam (only 42% positive the recent month), this game is dead to SEGA compared to CoH3 and Total Warhammer. Sure steam reviews are biased but they do represent the Warhammer community which SEGA takes very serious because of the big Total Warhammer IP.

The Warhammer fantasy IP is completely different from the much more popular 40K IP and as such has a different fanbase. If anything GW tried to cash in on the Total warhammer success by linking to their mini pages selling things from the AoS IP.

DoW3 failed because it was not a game made for DoW fans but Relic trying to compete directly with Blizzards wider audience which was pretty narrow-minded and foolish. Hiring pro Blizzard fan @iNcontroLTV to stream DoW3, my god what was Relic thinking?
How do I explain this. Incontrol was let go by Evil geniuses last year because Starcraft 2 isn't that big of an esport anymore and InControl wasn't a pro player anymore. At the same time he largely plays strategy games and competes in Warhammer 40k tournaments. As far as any online personality goes he is a pretty good fit for the series.

Also a clarification is needed for what you mean by DoW fans. The first two games play nearly completely differently in terms of gameplay and scale. Dawn of war 2 released with pretty polarised opinion and it was only after Retribution and the Last Stand mode that that the game began to carve it's own niche in the market. What saved the game was the non traditional RTS campaign which provided tons of content.

I can almost guarantee CoH3 will be a game made for LOYAL CoH2/CoH1 fans, not Blizzard fans.
With CoH3 we can also expect more Relic support to loyal modders/community content creators.

Dawn of war 3 has released with map support right from start. As far as official support goes it's a pretty nice standard to start your game. Time will tell if Relic will allow for total war levels of mod support or even that of dawn of war 1 levels.

This SEGA Europe video below confirms what I have previously said about new CoH modding tools/new SEGA business plan for CoH and Total War/Endless Space etc.. There is no way SEGA would buy Amplitude if they were not interested in more community interactions (look up Amplitude business plan, games2gether). This is what SEGA want for future CoH games. Well before CoH3, we can expect a CoH2 modding update to help preserve its longevity. Notice how John Clark mention RTS games (community maps). Over the past few years, Creative Assembly also has hired Total Wars modders and community content creators. As an example you had CA hiring TW community member Darren. Darren has previous also made youtube content for CoH2.

A couple of things about total war. CA has been hiring modders for a VERY long time. Their DLC content team is led by Jack Lusted, who was a pretty big modder during medieval 2. He made several AI improvements and a vanilla plus mod called Lands to Conquer http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/Lands_to_Conquer

The mod was interesting because the mini campaigns Jack came up with were more focused on mechanics than later total war total conversions and didn't add complex systems that would hinder turn times. His work on the campaign AI would be the basis of nearly every other campaign AI that would be integrated into Medieval 2 total war mods.

CA did the same with mitch, who led the modding team for the Great War mod for napoleon total war which provided a pretty different gameplay experience from the base game.

Relic makes RTS games with a very set formula that doesn't have the open endedness of total war games.

Co-op, custom maps and mods are in fact similar to multiplayer - they create a stable playerbase. In every statement in my last post you can change the word "multiplayer" into "custom maps" and it will be still valid. The problem is not enough stable playerbase after 3 weeks from release.

Because the game has been released in a relatively barebones amount compared to previous games that have had a ton of content put into the game over their dev cycles. And no, ladder games are completely detached from MP in terms of both design and gameplay for the most part. Relic's biggest mistake was letting dawn of war 3 ship out with nothing else to keep the non ladder players engaged with the game which is why people finished the relatively meaty campaign and then stopped playing.

Of course 5k is a good amount for RTS. It would be amazing amount of players for B class RTS. It is also a great amount of players for over 3 years old game such as CoH2. But it is definitely not a good score for 1st or 2nd most awaited RTS in 2017. This is not a good score for any AAA game just after release.

And here we come to the most sensible conclusion - the DoW3 is a game advertised as AAA, but in fact doesn't live up to this standard. That exactly explains the player drop down and it can be seen on every corner in the game, game streams or reviews.

What metric are you judging the numbers by? DoW3 had a higher peak player number than every other dawn of war game on steam. The only other RTS game apart from coh2 that has a higher number on steam is AOE:HD which is a remaster of AoE2.

BW: remastered is coming out this year, and so is total warhammer. Those games have a far more robust modding community than dawn of war 3. And what makes Relic a AAA studio? They have released 1 new product since they were brought out by SEGA and their support team is tiny. Dawn of war 3 is for all intents and purposes developed by a B-class RTS developer and it has a standard number of players given it's small amount of Co-op content.

You can rewind that graph to see coh2 release stats. It started with less players at realease but it took 5 months to go down to 5k level, not 3 weeks. Then it went high up again becouse of new content and ballance changes. No studio can release new content every 2-4 weeks just to keep game alive - that's why this graph means dow3 is soon to be completely dead.

Company of heroes 2's campaign wasn't as good as Dawn of war 3's in terms of story or having characters. Plenty of people brought the game to see what the story was with the blood ravens after retribution. Going by your logic having a lackluster campaign would be better for relic because it would show better player retention ratios. Dawn of war 3 doesn't seem to have a payable commander system either to keep the meta "fresh".

So you guys are comparing a game that has had multiple sales over it's lifetime and has more content with a game that has less and determining that the game has failed?

No no no my friend. This is ONE way to run businesses. There are also other (better for both, companies and players) ways.

If you think this is the ONLY way then you have fallen in to their trap.

Like what exactly?
And please don't point towards games like the Witcher 3 which have a far larger market share than any RTS game, or Grand Strategy/Tactics game.