Profile of Grumpy

Running With Scissors

Lol - that used to be my online name. Can't live up to that 25 years later so I'm just Grumpy.

What its like to work at Relic:

"working" at Relic

Obviously this isn't Relic but we can assume its not far off.

Lets not forget Relic won the "best places to work" in Canada 2022.

They won the 'health and well being award' in Canada for 2022.

COO Heidi Eaves won the best boss award in all of Canada for her Work/Life balance (you win this award by being favored heavily on the life side) and her 'COMPASSION DURING THE COVID-19 pandemic." whatever the fuck that means.

Source for mouth breathers (fantoschmuck)

https://www.sega.co.jp/en/release/221107_1.html
https://www.sega.co.jp/en/release/211118_1.html

Now, im all for a balance but you sure as shit better be taking care of business before playing BOARD GAMES and other ridiculous bullshit you are doing at 'work' The culture at Relic needs to change if its not too late already.

This reminds me of a situation at work where I was buying a software package at work. We met weekly with the sales manager and the main developer. After a couple weeks, I could see that the developer wasn't really doing anything, except maybe for an hour or so right before the meeting and sometimes not even then. I'm sure that the developer thought he had great work/life balance. The problem was that the software was missing necessary features. I ended up having to contact the sales manager and politely explain the situation and consequences if a change wasn't made. At the next meeting, they commented about how hard they had to work, but they did show up with the problems fixed. It seems like Relic needs someone who can do something similar to what the sales manager did.

I guess it comes down to how you might want to present a company for sale. If you have some workers apparently working on a new project as well as a core title just launched but ripe for improvement and exploration, maybe it might appeal to e.g. Smoking Gun?

This could be. If they are planning on selling it, they might want to make it look like it isn't gutted. I don't think that will work especially well considering that any company that buys them would normally want sales numbers anyway.

My first job out of college was with a company that was managed into bankruptcy and then bought by a Japanese firm. I'll never understand why, but the Japanese left the same managers in charge that put it into bankruptcy and they continued managing the same way. A similar thing happened to one of my relatives in a different industry. Maybe it's a cultural thing?

Complete full changelog here:


- Fallschirmpioneer Squad is overtuned relative to their timing
- Can only be dropped within LOS


- Mechanized Zeroing Artillery Barrage is overperforming for its cost and leaves little reaction time for players

For all parachute squads, wouldn't it be better and more realistic to just greatly decrease the precision where it drops?
The problems with parachute squads are:
-The drops are super accurate so you can drop them in the fog of war with no risk, generally right behind something like a MG.
-Units can't fire at them until they finish dropping and can shoot. They shouldn't be invulnerable while parachuting.

Changing that would eliminate most of the BS.

The zeroing arty change is good. It currently guarantees wipes of any team weapon without a retreat button.

The conventional reply to your post would be "What are you on and can I have some of it".

I doubt if Relic could afford either Inverse or Whiteflash who appear to be successful in their own commercial fields.

If Janne had wanted to work at Relic, he would have been there by now.

Following the live stream in 2014 with Yoink and remarks passed in a haze (to the enjoyment of all but Relic), I am afraid Ami became persona non grata for certain chaps at Relic, hence Operation Charlie Fox in 2015 (CF = crowd funding), which was the only way we could set up a big tournament without Relic support. Even with the success of OCF, Relic did not budge.

Apart from that, I agree with your post.

My guess is that Janne is also well compensated. He certainly has skills. For reference, one of my relatives is a developer for a financial company and makes double the average game developer salary, another works for and IT consulting company and makes about 1.5x.

Relic mostly just needed a competent project manager for COH3. My view from afar is that they didn't. I've managed projects in a couple of industries for 30+ years and am sure that I would've been fired from any position I've ever had if I would've delivered something like COH3.

As far as the number being indicative of something else, my impression is that Relic has way too many employees for a studio that doesn't have a major release soon. Also, the org chart for COH3 looked way too fat. One trivial example is having an Art Director and a Technical Art Director. When you have multiple people doing similar jobs, the result is usually that it slows progress, and makes what should be simple decisions into nightmarish committee decisions.

If Sega was going to pull the plug, it seems like the cuts would've been much deeper. You don't need to keep a couple hundred employees to transfer the intellectual property to another development studio.