Company Of Heroes devs Relic bounce back with plans for big RTS games, smaller experiments and spiritual revivals

Last March, Sega sold off Company Of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War developers Relic Entertainment in the course of wider “restructuring”, “realigning” and lay-offening at the house of Sonic. Relic’s new corporate partners are a holding company established by the UK investment firm Emona Capital LLP – an arrangement that apparently lets them operate like an independent studio, though I’m fuzzy on the moving parts.

I was happy to hear that Relic had escaped outright closure. I’m even happier to hear that they’re making more strategy games – a mixture of revival projects, big new games, and smaller productions with a faster turnaround.

All that’s from a brief chat with Game Developer, in which CEO Justin Dowdeswell lays on the talk of sunlit uplands. Relic will continue to support their existing games, like 2023’s Company Of Heroes 3. They’ll also work on projects of similar scale and complexity, perhaps including remasters or re-releases for older Relic games. There’s the dangled carrot of remakes that “capture the spirit of the originals” but, by implication, take a few liberties with the fundamentals. Picking which older Relic games to revive will, as you’d expect, be a “multifactored process” of haggling it out with external partners.

And then there’s the prospect of smaller Relic projects that, in Game Developer’s paraphrase, will allow the developers to “explore new genres and experiences”. Relic’s hope is to develop and ship these in under two years.

“We’re looking to operate with smaller teams on shorter timeframes, which means likely getting a game in market roughly in the 1-2 year range,” Dowdeswell explained. “Budget costs will vary depending on scope, but these titles will have a notably smaller budget than the big Relic RTS games we will continue to work on.”

Relic cut back on staff following the Sega sale, but Dowdeswell insists the company are on a “much better footing” these days. Fingers crossed that it all pans out, I guess. While they’re a different team nowadays, I still venerate Relic as the creators of the original Homeworld, to say nothing of Dawn Of War, and their recent stuff has been pretty good: Katharine (RPS in peace) called Company Of Heroes 3 “a glorious comeback”.