All the terrible games we're getting recently are a direct result of incompetent high level leadership among other reasons, but leadership is definitely one of top 3 reasons.
It is all lost. You cannot "review your priorities" out of this situation.
The all too familiar formula:
1. New unfinished game, Beta with many problems.
2. Release it anyway, people hate it, population drops to unsustainable levels
3. Statement "We missed the mark", but we are in for the long haul, yet not a single obligation, just vague promises and roadmaps
4. 6-12 months later "Incredibly difficult decision to move on"
The June/July content of this game has been made prior to layoffs. 3 maps and some battlegroups.
Relic still has 300 or so employees. That still seems like an awful lot for maintenance releases. If pushing updates through Steam is as easy as it looks, I'd bet my PMP certification that a competent project manager could get the game fixed in a couple months with about 1/4 of those 300 employees.
CoH3 is not the sole exclusive active relic game.
There is AoE4 and SM2 development too and these people are not doing all 3 projects at once, this much I can assure you, they have separate teams. For all we know, CoH3 team could be 10 guys now.
Clown people are making our games on the "west".
Meritocracy is dead in western AAA gaming.
This is specifically why we have social messages constantly inserted into everything coming from western AAA and this is why everything is shit at release and ends up as shit abandonware within 1 year despite promisses of "years of support".
Canada and US are completely obsessed and overtaken by these movements, entertainment and big tech is especially overrun and guess where all these AAA publishers and developers have their HQs located?
Every single developer dreams of recovery like No Mans Sky had, while every single publisher believes its OK to release the game in No Mans Sky release state, while lacking any kind of support and commitment to fix it.
6 months to 1 year, that's the lifespan of "life service games we will support for next 10 years", I'm really curious to see if it'll be any different for CoH3, but the trend is not promising much here.
Isn't it much more likely that one, or several people in key positions just weren't up to the job at hand? 'Woke Culture' feels a bit too convenient. I'm sure plenty of studios and other similar industries lean in this direction ideologically but the people involved can still, on the whole, do their jobs.
Go through Relics own twitter feed.
At least a handful of employees got the job, because they had vaginas, not required skill and experience level.
Oh fuck that. Nobody would give a shit about a remastered CoH2 on the same old shitty engine. Ehh, nobody apart from the skeleton crew that keeps playing CoH2 for hours every day and will do so for the next 20 years.
That's a pill which is hard to swallow to some here.