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?
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#Steam AliasWL%Streak
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