Profile of Hannibal

I think half of the backlash could have been avoided or at least alleviated by proper communication. It's really mind boggling how either their PR managers don't understand PR or that they are ham strung by their bosses. They always produce quite high quality videos reading from their teleprompters, but consistently miss the point of what the community wants and actually cares about.

I'm following Warno at the moment. Eugen systems has (according to Google) one tenth (!) of the employees that Relic has (roughly 40 vs 400). Let's split Relic's number to 250 due to AoE4. I guess there is administration staff in those numbers as well, so not all of them are devs. The game has been released one year ago as a real early access: Fairly low content, only 2 divisions (roughly a faction on CoH's terms), but working engine. Today it has a number of divisions and way more features but is still in early access due to the lack of SP content. The overall MP state looks better to me than CoH3 by far. A quick look at the Steam news site: Weekly dev blogs, regular updates (some smaller, some bigger), every month or so a larger update with new features. They address balance issues, specify what they're working on now and how they want it to look like, roughly when to expect the feature release or why their feature/update has been delayed. They're even so honest to say that they don't release an update on Fridays because it won't be fixed over the weekend if stuff breaks. You know what? Fair enough. Good decision. They even have a post starting with "mea culpa".

Why can't Relic have any of this? We don't know what they are currently working on for the most part. Parts of their "briefings" are being "redacted" by themselves when they announce it to hide hideous stuff. It's quite exceptional that at the moment we actually know that they are working on the console release and some balance update (due to the balance stream soon). But for the most part after release, there was nothing like this.
It's been two months now, and the only update that Relic labeled as "large" actually wasn't. Not a single feature has been added, and few bugs squished since then.
Why is a 40 men dev team seriously outperforming a company so much larger?

Sorry that was for fantomasas

Also he did not claim so.

He wrote SturmtigerCobra was using rhetorics of conspiracy theorists (I personally don't like that expression, but anyway) by putting the existance of ESG investmentand Sega/Relic into the same post, thereby loosely connecting them and suggesting that Relic went to shit because ESG investment were giving bad incentives to companies (or so I imagine, it is nowhere clearly written how the mechanism is supposed to work. I guess it must be hidden in the posted 1,5h video that I did not watch instead of providing a good 5 minute summary article).

He does not give any proof for this claim. He throws it into the same pot saying one is causing the other, nothing else, then stirs in some memes and an unrelated wikipedia article. There is not a single piece of data or analysis or at the very least reasoning provided that connects ESG-guided investment as the cause for Relic being in a bad state.

From what Cobra posts, I could as well turn his logic upside down: ESG investment will collapse because Relic keeps releasing bad games. Proof? Sega has some ESG guidelines. That's about as much "data" as OP provided.
Actually, not even that. You had to go to Sega's website and look for their ESG summary. The summary is highly superficial and not providing any real corporate details or the influence of ESG on Sega's business strategy (I haven't clicked any links on the site, maybe it is further down). Cobra didn't even do the very basics for his claim.

There's nothing spot on with cobras post. His posts are unfortunately often pretty incoherent rambling with no backup. Not all, but quite some.

Before we break it down, let's define that the main claim is that ESG (environmental, social, governance focused) investment leads to SEGA/Relic defining their products according to these values, which is the reason why the companies are not "healthy" in a classic economic way and ultimately why CoH3 is bad.

Point by point:

FYI;
According to multiple insider sources and the latest rumors are expecting ESG funds (stakeholder capitalism) to collapse/dissolve in 2023.

That means layoffs across the entire tech sector and the entire video game industry.
Sega/Relic is reliant on ESG funds such as Blackrock and Vanguard.

Two claims in here that have no backup, no source, not even a vague one claiming that's the case. For the amount of memes that are posted down below, why is there no source to the central two claims of the whole post?
Where's the analysis of how much investment firms have invested into Sega and or Relic under ESG rules? The last sentence can even be misread that BL and VG only invest according to ESG "guidelines". That's complete nonsense.

Next question:
Even without data, are these claims correct? The first one we can't tell yet, but it's also only April. There's no ESG related big downfall of the economy. For the time being, this is "waiting for happening" at best.
We've indeed seen layoffs in the IT industry, but without direct relation to ESG investments.

Show Spoiler

I'll collapse this since all of this is just throwing in the point that Relic ignored "red flags" followed by a lot of memes and a link to Wikipedia about "Malinvestment", which in turn is not linked to ESG investment. It proves nothing, it's just making the post longer and fakes some data or "being informed" about the topic. I'll jump to the last bit of actual content:

Why ESG Is the Biggest Scam of the 21st Century | Vivek Ramaswamy;

Is that true? To be honest, I don't know. It's a 1,5h youtube video/podcast. You can get basic insights into goals and problems of ESG based investment in a normal article read that takes 5-10 minutes. Read a couple, get opinions from multiple people in the financial industry. These could have been linked.
Instead, here's a 1,5h video where I get the opinion of 2 people only. Why? No one is going to watch it, and even if I watch it I have the opinion of exactly 2 people. It doesn't make sense, especially since Cobra assumes that he needs to explain what a malinvestment is. Why not link more basic stuff instead?



There indeed are problems with ESG funding.
Cobra claims, but can't link any of it to Relic or SEGA with the stuff he provides. It's just rambling for rambling's sake.

snip

My post was not particularly about why CoH3 has issues, but why Relic has to patch sooner rather than later with a view on the whole franchise.

Previously, CoH2 had 9-10k players at peak (depending on the "phase" of the game and which time frame, but this was roughly the state in 2022). Now, CoH2 and CoH3 combined have 11-12k players. That's roughly a 2k gain in total player numbers, but now split roughly evenly between both games with CoH2 getting influx and CoH3 getting eflux. CoH3 gets further patches and players will continuously check in how much the game has improved after each patch. The hardcore fans will play either CoH2 or CoH3, whichever one they deem the better product at any time.
The problem is: If Relic keeps on with smaller patches only fixing a couple of features (not talking about short term meta or balance, but stuff that will actually make the game feel good to play) per patch, the player base will stay split. The lower player numbers however decrease the quality of matchmaking (which I can personally anecdotally confirm for CoH2). This could cause what I termed "intermediate fans" to leave the franchise entirely, because now both CoH2 and CoH3 are not as fun to play anymore and another game is better.

I doubt Relic will abandon CoH3 that quickly, the game is not in a great state but not horribly failing either, and player numbers still go down but apparently stabilize for the time being and not indicating a complete failure as well. The most likely way forward is that Relic keeps supporting and patching at least for the next months.

Those need to be big patches. After failing to gain a new audience, Relic needs to move most players to CoH3. The other option is that CoH3 completely fails and the community goes back to CoH2. But keeping both games only half-alive will hurt both in the long run.

Not necessarily. It's a pretty random example I know, but in another, popular game I play called "Dead by Daylight", a premium cosmetic skin for one character costs 11€ on average while a new chapter -which includes two new playable characters and 6 new playable perks- costs 7€


Wait for the new CoH3 battlegroups and see how much they cost, and then let's complain afterwards if it's a rip-off

What you describe is really an exception. Most games shit their games with MTX. I don't see why I should pretend Relic would be the rare exception, given that everything - releasing a half finished game, prioritizing store over game fixes, fake currencies, token freemium model, similar behaviour in CoH2, even the publisher being SEGA - that they did so far points towards heavy monetization. There is no reason to give Relic the benefit of the doubt.