Making games is a bit like a real-time strategy game. And sometimes you have to change course.
Relic Entertainment, which is newly independent after spinning out of its previous owner Sega, is now charting a new course as an indie maker of real-time strategy games and smaller “adjacent” genres of games.
Relic Entertainment was founded in Vancouver, Canada, in 1997. It has made big games like Company of Heroes (2006), Company of Heroes 2 (2013), Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Homeworld. But Relic’s parent company THQ faltered. Sega acquired Relic in 2013 during the bankruptcy proceedings for THQ. During that earlier era, Sega made big investments into RTS games with its acquisition of Creative Assembly, maker of the Total War games, which Sega had purchased in 2005.
Relic worked on multiple titles for Sega, but its flagship game, Company of Heroes 3, took a decade to get out the door and its sales were disappointing. Relic had to downsize its staff and Sega spun it out as a separate company in April 2023.
“I joined then because I believed deeply in the potential of rallying great people, an amazing history of games and some proprietary technology that led the studio to make great games,” Dowdeswell said. “I believe that the combination of all that potential in the studio plus the support of Sega was a great starting point for putting Relic back on the map.”
He added, “That’s the same spirit I have 11 years later in a new chapter. The studio is independent again and the studio has innovated for its whole existence. The ability to tap into that is best served with Relic as an independent studio.”
Life as an independent
Dowdeswell has been around at Relic since 2013, just after Sega acquired the studio after the bankruptcy.
Relic has a great pedigree as an RTS company. It owns the Company of Heroes intellectual property, which was first created by Relic in 2006 with the first game. Company of Heroes 2 came out in 2013, and Company of Heroes 3 debuted in 2023.
Meanwhile, the Dawn of War/Space Marine IP is owned by Games Workshop. The past games are still catalog titles being sold by Relic. Dowdeswell said Games Workshop has been a strong supporter. And while Relic developed Age of Empires IV, that IP is owned by Microsoft.
“The opportunity we have here is to crack the case of where RTS needs to go next,” Dowdeswell said. “We’ve definitely seen really highly engaged multiplayer audiences. But it is limited when we talk about Company of Heroes, for example. This is a game set in World War II, which limits the audience to some degree. It’s an RTS which further limits the audience. And when we internally talk about what the barriers are for us, broadening that audience is big. How do we bring new players in? How do we reach players?”
Staging a comeback
The company has just under 100 people now, with most of them in Vancouver, Canada, though there is some hybrid work. There’s no in-office mandate.
The company is set up for self-funding at the moment. The DLC and smaller games that it is publishing will help it build “new muscles” in terms of building games in a sustainable way, Dowdeswell said.
“The fact that we are releasing things out of the studio, updates to existing games and new stuff, plus controlled growth, is very positive for us,” Dowdeswell said. “And some of those people are returning– people who left the studio and are now back. So it’s feeling a lot better.”
There are a handful of RTS game makers around still, some older like Creative Assembly and some newer. The range and scope is broad. There are bigger RTS games and smaller ones as well. The company has studied the market to understand where players are going.
“We definitely strongly believe there is a market and there are players out there,” he said. “It’s our job to give them the next great RTS.”
Rising costs
He noted that project budgets have been rising. That means more risk, and it’s harder to predict commercial success compared to the past. In particular, real-time strategy has become a smaller part of the market and it makes sense to create such games as an independent company, rather than a part of a large triple-A game company.
“There is still a market for RTS and obviously Relic is known for that genre. It’s certainly not the dominant genre today as it was in 2000. We’ve seen that change. But there’s still an audience for it.”
The company can amass a sizable budget for an RTS and aim for a good result.
“As an independent studio, we have to walk this line of being a fairly well-known studio with a long history and also hope to that player affection for an indie example in terms of where we are going,” he said. “We still relic and that’s really important to me. We have a history of high quality games that have long persistent multiplayer communities.”
He added, “We’re not going to lose that. We’re not walking away from that and in fact I believe it’s partly our responsibility but it’s also something we’re really excited to do. We will chart that next step for for the RTS genre. What is the future of RTS? Our games have definitely built sequel upon sequel where we flex. We can increase that cognitive load and increase the barrier to entry for new players.”
The company won’t walk away from its existing player base. The company will do product-market tests and figure out the direction to go with its smaller games, Dowdeswell said.
“If we have an Achilles heel as a studio, it’s the fact that it takes us a long time games As far as AI tools to improve game development, Dowdeswell said it’s early days in terms of investigating that. There’s nothing concrete to report, he said. that has a number of undesirable effects,” he said.
The company can lose traction and relevance with players and the market.
“You lose the ability to act when there are opportunities that come up in terms of new platforms, new services. We definitely want to tackle that, as I mentioned with our Relic manifesto for the future of RTS. But another way is making more indie style games, slightly more experimental, taking some chances and I dare say having a little bit more fun with development when we can.”
Self-funding smaller games with a faster development cycle
Now the company is working on something called Relic Labs.
“We can take some chances but again set the expectation that those games are smaller in scope and scale and not necessarily traditional RTS games,” said Dowdeswell. “They might be adjacent to that genre, certainly within our wheelhouse as a strategy studio. Releasing those games on a much more frequent basis. We’re staying close to the players, staying close to the communities we’re trying to create and learning along the way.”
When you have long development cycles, you miss out on the ability to learn frequently and make contact with players. Now there are a few things coming in 2025 and Relic will both support its existing games with multiple updates for Company of Heroes 3, which came out in February 2023.
“It’s not just patches and bug fixes. It’s features and content and that’s all coming this year as well,” he said.
The company will also make an announcement for one of its indie-style games soon as well, using the term “Relic Labs” as a description so players can understand the difference between the smaller titles and what it would traditionally do with a larger scope.
The first Relic Labs title is not a traditional RTS but it is “adjacent” in the strategy area and it’s a way for the company to experiment. It has given the team some guardrails, like making sure it can hit the market within a year. The company will try out different technology compared to its proprietary engine which can get very high unit counts on a map.
“We’re gonna try this game with an off-the-shelf engine. Again, it’s all part of increasing our ability to get games to market more quickly,” he said.
More Company of Heroes 3
Last week, Relic Entertainment surprised fans by announcing it would launch its new upcoming downloadable content (DLC) and major update for Company of Heroes 3. Relic said it is committed to updates and community engagement to ensure that the game is a long-lasting experience for players. Its new DLC is called Fire & Steel.
Dowdeswell said that the studio will be doing multiple releases for new content for Company of Heroes 3, which first came out in 2023. It’s not just balance patches and bug fixes. It will release new features, content, and that’s all coming this year as well.
This real-time strategy game was one of my favorite games of 2023. It fulfilled some serious pent-up demand. It came out a full decade after Company of Heroes 2, which covered the Russian front.
This time, you played as the Allies assaulting North Africa and Italy during World War II. The game was split into a turn-based strategic map where you had to contemplate the big picture. When your units met the enemy on the map, you could move into a tactical battle where the position of your units — getting enough firepower to each firefight at the right time — made you work so hard that you had to become a mastermind at micromanagement. Now the fixes are coming.
“It’s meaningful for us, partly because of our ability to support that title and certainly make improvements that the players are asking for in the last couple of years. But it’s also a really strong signal nearly a year on after leaving Sega that we’re still able to support that,” Dowdeswell said. “Our intention is to support that because it’s a really big part of what it stands for.”
With the new features, players will now be able to create battlegroups for single-player skirmish vs Ai, and for multiplayer. Company of Heroes 3: Fire & Steel is a Battlegroup DLC pack consisting of four battlegroups for multiplayer and co-op/ skirmish vs AI. Each army in the game will receive a new battlegroup.
As a reminder to lapsed players, a battlegroup is a supplemental force that a player brings to battle, consisting of powerful units and abilities that allow players to enhance their forces, employ new tactics and strategies, and allow for a different playstyle for their army. The battlegroups system is the evolution of commanders and doctrines from Company of Heroes 1 and 2.
These battlegroups may well be the most exciting post-launch content to date. First, each battlegroup contains one super-heavy tank, each of which are franchise classics, and have been highly requested by the CoH3 community. The M26 Pershing, Churchill Crocodile, King Tiger, and Elefant Tank Destroyer are all making their return.
Not only that, but each battlegroup will bring a number of exciting units, and abilities. Some of these will introduce new mechanics and fresh gameplay loops to the franchise, while others will be iconic series favorites.
Making RTS games for modern gamers
The task of changing the approach is a combination of looking at where people drop off, like if they drop out of the game after a given mission. Or why people don’t stick around for multiplayer after finishing a single-player campaign.
“We’ve targeted a few elements around the number of units, the cognitive load, those things that get in the way of how to understand how to play the game and be competitive,” he said. “Reducing those without reducing the depth of the game is basically the challenge of how do we make it relevant for players today. And that even extends to things like session length. We can’t have matches that take 90 minutes to play as that doesn’t really suit the way people want to play games today.”
The aim is to build a game that is truly a Relic game while taking this modern tastes into account.
Dowdeswell said that both younger players and older players are having trouble with the current high demands of RTS games.
“There’s an audience. But I find some of our games quite challenging to get good at,” he said. “You’re facing this huge wall of lore in some cases, or history. Then you add to that a massive learning curve or just skill at playing the game — that’s where we lose people.”
I’d agree with this assessment for Company of Heroes 3. I loved the RTS matches in the real-time battles. But the campaign map was a bit lacking for me, as there weren’t enough units moving across the strategic map at a time. On top of that, I got slaughtered whenever I played multiplayer, even after I finished the single-player campaign.
Dowdeswell said he agreed that his former sister company, Creative Assembly, did a great job with its grand strategy layer, whereas the campaign map was a first for Company of Heroes 3. The strategy map wasn’t as fun for the players. The polish wasn’t quite as good as needed either. Still, that said, I think the concept of combining a turn-based campaign strategy map — where you see the big picture — with a detailed real-time tactical battlefield rendered in beautiful 3D is quite viable.
“We are definitely as a studio looking at turn-based as another way to reduce that load. It shows up to a certain extent in the single player. One of the features we really like for Company Heroes 3 was that tactical pause,” he said. “It was basically a way to slow down the action, give you time to think and respond appropriately to the situation and then re-engage with the simulation.”
Changing with the times
Looking at the bigger issues in gaming, Dowdeswell said he sees the budget crisis in triple-A games and how that has had a lasting effect on the industry. There ware multiple ways to address that with things like product cycles, where teams don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time, looking at follow-on content creation costs, he said.
“When you have a game that is very custom-built for an experience to tell a story, all of that content tends to be really expensive to make, which means producing stuff after is almost prohibitive depending on the size of your audience,” he said. “So tackling all those things is vitally important to us. One of our greatest strengths is that we’ve been around since 1997 and one of our greatest weaknesses is that we’ve been around since 1997.”
The company and the team grew up at a time when the market and consumers were very different. You can engage with the community in many different ways now like in-game chat or forums or Discord or Reddit. The company plans to stay in touch with fans through these means.
As far as AI tools to improve game development, Dowdeswell said it’s early days in terms of investigating that. There’s nothing concrete to report, he said.
“It’s already a different Relic. I think coming through the process of once again becoming an independent studio has taught us a lot,” he said. “We have obviously made changes to allow us to better manage our costs and we have to watch that a lot more closely.”
Dowdeswell said the company wants everyone to focus on making great games and it wants to provide a roadmap for the whole studio to see where it’s going.
“In the past, because our projects were so long, we could have people start and finish their time at Relic — three years, four years sometimes — and now have shipped a game at the studio,” Dowdeswell said.
That would happen even though the team was in full production on a game the whole time.
“That is a big change because it doesn’t really work for the business,” Dowdeswell said. “But even more important, it doesn’t really work for players or people who work at Relic. There’s always a huge satisfaction when you release a game. You see players react to it. We missed out on that. There’s energy from that. And Bringing that back to Relic is one of the ways we are changing.”
He added, “Obviously, we’re a lot we’re a lot smaller as well than we were at our peak. But I think that comes with the direction we’ve taken in terms of trying both traditional games and a bit more of an indie style.”
