Sega Lays Off 121 Employees at Relic Entertainment - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 23 May 2023 / 3,041 Views
Sega announced it is laying 121 employees at Company of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment.
The developer is being restructured to focus on core franchises, including Company of Heroes.
"At a time where external factors are impacting our industry more than ever, the difficult decision to restructure has been made to ensure that maximum focus can be placed on Relic's core franchises," said Sega in a statement sent to GamesIndustry.
"Sega is in a healthy financial position and remains fully committed to supporting and investing in Relic Entertainment and the franchises it is responsible for, including the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes series. We're confident that following this necessary restructure, the studio will be in a position of strength to continue delivering outstanding experiences to players all over the world.
"Making decisions like this is incredibly difficult, and as a studio that treasures its people and is proud of the culture it's grown, the focus is on supporting departing employees with career transition services and severance packages. We would like to offer our sincerest thanks to each of them for the part they've played in helping Relic Entertainment's projects achieve global renown."
Company of Heroes 3 released for PC in February and will launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on May 30.
An announcement from Relic Entertainment. pic.twitter.com/EITW2tbG7w
— Relic Entertainment (@relicgames) May 23, 2023
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I mean, tbf, it's been some yrs since the last CoH game, and they come out with a muddy/mediocre looking CoH sequel and from what I saw, it wasn't exactly praised much if at all.
I wouldn't have laid them off though. They just need to engage with players early into the concept stage, rather than spending years not interacting with their audience and banking everything on what we may want, and then it not turning out to be anything good at all (then looking at the staff you want to let go, because you didn't plan accordingly).
They are only doing Company of Heroes and Dawn of War for Sega so I don’t see how either is not a core franchise for them.
Wow......that's nearly half the studio! Company of Heroes 3 must have done a lot worse than Relic was expecting.
What is really strange is that it doesn't seem like it has sold that poorly. Steam Spy has it in the 200-500k range on PC 3 months after release, and the console ports haven't even released yet, they release on May 30th. By comparison, it took Company of Heroes 2 about 9 months to sell 680k copies on PC. So sales seem to be tracking pretty similarly to Company of Heroes 2. Maybe Sega had wildly higher sales expectations for the 3rd game than the 2nd, but if so that was dumb of them, if anything RTS popularity has dwindled in the decade since the 2nd game released, they should be happy to have maintained sales compared to the 2nd game.
I have to wonder if this wasn't related to Company of Heroes 3 at all, maybe Xbox had contracted them out to develop another Age of Empires or Age of Mythology game, but then cancelled said game, leaving Sega with a whole 120 developer team with no game to develop, so Sega just laid them off. I hope that isn't the case, I really don't want to see the strong Sega/Xbox relationship soured.
