You could easily google this and see a ton of different reasons and theories as to why. Obviously this will be subjective but here is one quick link Study shows remote workers less productive
Second, Relic hired 350 people. Built them a beautiful space to work and collaborate that was VERY expensive. The least the employees could do is come into work and do what they were paid to do. It seems that culture created at Relic was a 'kid-glove' approach where employees were given everything at their whim without actually producing anything of value.
I have no issue with employees reaping benefits or unionizing IF they had created something of value. Instead all they did was create debt and simply under preform. I don't know how else to slice it. One way clear way to combat lack of production is to have a boss (or baby sitter) ensuring the employees are focused and on track. Much harder to accomplish this when people are 'working' from home.
Not disagreeing with some of what you've said in this thread, but your general attitude to shift the blame of failure onto the 'workers' rather than the decision makers as an overall trend in your comments.
Relic's executive decision makers made some very bad decisions at every turn, over committing to a scope (2 campaigns 4 factions at release) they were likely under funded to achieve, with no respect for what was done for the previous two launches of CoH. Meanwhile they had to do all this whilst using an entirely new engine, the one that was purpose built for AoEIV. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
They also set the tone of the culture you speak of, they work with HR to sign off on policies and working methodologies. They hire the people they want to hire and build their team according to their plan and understanding of what is needed. If that culture and team ends up working from home and only doing what's in their work flow at a steady pace, that's not because they're lazy Vancouver hippies, people work to the culture and their surroundings. If you don't drive performance from the top, you can't just expect it to magically happen.
Also you have the problem of some teams over performing, and some teams under performing. It's clear to me the engineers/coders did really well, the UI/art teams were ridiculously under funded (like a 2 person team), game design had a clear vision to appeal to the CoH1 audience which they largely succeeded in, the marketing team was so far off note and key I wonder if they have ever even played CoH in any meaningful way. When your marketing team is producing things like the flying scalf trailer what chance do you really have? You're an engineer that could have crunched your ass off to make sure COH3 was optimised and then that happens? You simply can't pin it on relic as a 'whole' imo.
I definitely feel that it wasn't just strategic failures, it was also a cultural issue. But I think you haven't gotten the balance right in your posts here between the two, in my opinion at least.
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