Relic lays off 121 employees | Hacker News Reader

Relic lays off 121 employees

eurogamer.net

11 pointsjohntiger122 comments

I've been a Relic fan for longer than I can remember. Homeworld, Dawn of War 1 & 2, CoH 1 & 2 are among the most important games in my life. It really hurts me to see what has become of Relic in the past few years.

I feel terrible for the people caught up in layoffs. But from an organisational perspective, a studio with as little IP and as few releases as Relic can't get away with 2 botched releases in a row. It's especially galling because their community could have and did tell them what was going wrong with these games prior to the release. This was all just so damn predictable.

Relic and Massive were two of my favorite RTS studios but unfortunately they kinda died.

Massive went from ground control 1/2 and World in Conflict to doing pretty poor 3rd person loot shooters for UbiSoft and Relic just did CoH and CoH: Warhammer.

RTS as a genre has died unfortunately it used to be one of the biggest genres in PC gaming but the rise of console gaming and online play seemed to have completely killed it.

It’s now seem more or less relegated to indie games and nostalgia farming (AoE and Homeworld).

And many indie games don’t seem to be able to balance the gameplay well enough. I had pretty big hopes for iron harvest but the balancing is so broken that the game is simply not challenging enough and the maps are often too damn small for any strategic play.

I really wish when layoffs were announced that the media would report how many employees the company actually has.

I have no idea how big Relic actually are - Is 121 employees 1%? 10%? 50%?

Sounds like you need an AI assistant that filters everything you read to include answers to the prompt,

"tell me some relevant statistics about the parties involved in this article"

Yeah?

By AI, do you mean "actual intelligence"?

Perhaps someone whose job it is to report relevant details about an event? Say, we could call them a "reporter"!

I've been thinking that AI and biological intelligence could work together, as this is going to be the way it is for the rest of human history unless we have like some kind of new dark ages.

So, getting with the program is what I'm talking about. And the program is, generative AIs are going to be everywhere. And we as technologists need to figure out how to make them better.

AI bros are the new crypto bros.

Google bar told me that they have 331 employees according to LinkedIn data

Well their wiki page says "300+" employees pre-layoff citing this source https://www.gamekult.com/actualite/la-premiere-mise-a-jour-m... (although I can't see any reference to that number in that text. My French is practically nonexistant though)

I've heard this number means 40-50%

Sounds like a two project studio that just had one of their big projects cancelled. That's the sort of thing that will cause a massive blow like this.

Looking around it's really hard to say that the Vancouver games industry is looking terribly healthy right now.

Yep, I wonder how this will affect Company of Heroes development going forward

Serves them right for going the completely wrong direction with the Dawn of War sequels. (sarcasm)

But really, squad level combat with leveling heroes and skill trees? No, bigger scale! Let me smash companies of Imperial Guards against hordes of xenos.

Anyway, sad to see layoffs at yet another tech outfit.

Dawn of war 2 was excellent, 3 was hot garbage.

Age of Empires 4 is fine (I think it was done by Relic?). No idea about CoH3, hope it's good, I liked the first a lot, 2nd was ok.

The console version releases next week. Regardless of how you feel about CoH on a console (personally I think it's another incredibly stupid move on Relic's part) we can only hope that the release will free up resources to fix up CoH3.

But that seems overly optimistic. I will keep playing CoH3 because despite its flaws it's still a fun game. But for now I consider it the next DoW3 and I expect support to be pulled shortly.

Is it really better than CoH2 though?

Yes and no. It has some improvements and it has some major missing pieces. But I have played CoH2 for a decade, I'm happy to move on.

It's interesting that you say "move on" when lots of the reviews I read said it was a step backward in terms of depth and graphics quality.

Ok but it's still different. I've finished with CoH2, 10 years was enough.

For sure :) ... now let me just fire up my games from 2003 lol

I mis-read the title as NewRelic, and I thought "Their user-based pricing has now come back to bite them"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Relic_Entertainment_ga...

They make video games like homeworld Warhammer and company of heroes

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