In the nearly 30 years since they opened their doors, Relic have been an enormously influential studio. Responsible for lauded RTS series Homeworld, Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes, they also dabbled in other genres with third-person shooter The Outfit and the original Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Yet, despite this history, in 2024, when Relic were negotiating their sale from Sega to UK investment firm Emona Capita, CEO Justin Dowdeswell knew the rights to Company of Heroes had to be part of the deal. “Without it we would have been a dead studio,” he tells me.
Without naming names Dowdeswell points out that there are “numerous examples” of studios that weren’t able to survive on their name alone. Not only did Relic need the ability to make more games in the series that they were known for, but they also needed the income from back catalogue sales a series like Company of Heroes provides.
Dowdeswell joined Relic shortly after Sega acquired the studio in 2013. This was in the immediate aftermath of publisher THQ’s bankruptcy auction, where studios and franchises were sold off to the highest bidder. While Sega bought the studio, they didn’t buy the licenses to everything Relic had created. “The other games that Relic made – Homeworld, Impossible Creatures, The Outfit… formative games in many people’s memory – they were all split up, scattered,” Dowdeswell says. “I think that was… I won’t say a tragedy, but it’s unfortunate because Relic is the home of those games. It would have been great for them to stay with the studio.”
Just as a hint of the messy history of acquisitions and auctions: this year we see Dawn of War 4 coming from studio King Art Games and published by Deep Silver. Deep Silver are a subdivision of Plaion, formerly called Koch Media, which was acquired by Embracer Group back when they were called THQ Nordic. Not that they were actually the THQ that originally published Relic’s Dawn of War, Nordic Games renamed themselves THQ Nordic after they bought the THQ trademark at auction.
As for Homeworld, Borderlands developer Gearbox picked up the license to the sci-fi RTS in the bankruptcy auction, then contracted Blackbird Interactive’s support on the remasters, before handing the latter lead development on Homeworld 3. That chain of events does have a more clear throughline to Relic’s past however, as Blackbird was created by two of Relic’s co-founders Rob Cunningham and Jon Aaron Kambeitz. (Speaking of studios struggling without the series they made their name with, Blackbird was on the verge of bankruptcy before Gearbox got in touch with the Homeworld work. So we very nearly existed in a world where they never got to make the brilliant Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and Hardspace Shipbreaker.)
Anyway, this is all getting side-tracked. Back to holding onto Company of Heroes when separating from Sega. “Fighting for Company of Heroes when leaving Sega was crucial because I already lamented the fact that the other games didn’t come with Relic,” Dowdeswell says. “I couldn’t really imagine a Relic where none of the games that the studio has made and was known for were any longer part of it.”
Relic and new owner UK investment firm Emona Capital LLP were able to negotiate Company of Heroes as part of the sale from Sega and since then the studio has spent the past two years focusing largely on supporting the WW2 RTS and restoring their back catalogue. The most recent update is the massive 3.0 patch to mark the series’ 20th anniversary. Which, among many changes, overhauls the Mediterranean-set RTS game’s special effects, audio systems, NPC AI, and makes significant changes to the singleplayer grand strategy-inspired Italy campaign, as well as adding a whole set of autumn and winter-themed assets for community map makers. They’ve also released a series of DLCs adding new factions to Company of Heroes 3‘s skirmishes and multiplayer, re-released Dawn of War with a definitive edition and announced they’re doing the same for the original Company of Heroes, along with Blackbird Interactive’s help. Dowdeswell says foundation building masks a lot of the work going on behind the scenes: “We now self-publish all of this,” he explains. “There were a number of things that we had to learn, skills we had to develop, capacity and capability that we had to build at the studio very, very quickly.”
I ask if it was always the plan to focus on their back catalogue, or if they had plans to release new games. Dowdeswell says spending four years quietly working on a new game wasn’t an option: “It’s almost impossible to do it that way because of the current climate in the industry. We don’t have a financial safety net.” Though, the team do have larger ambitions. “We want to make new games, we want to provide a modern Relic game,” Dowdeswell says. “That ambition to re-establish Relic as an innovator in this strategy space is a big part of what drives our creative direction on new games.” Focusing on updating Company of Heroes 3, releasing DLC for the game, and making definitive editions of Dawn of War and the original Company of Heroes is what gets the studio to the place it can make a new game.
However, Dowdeswell resists any framing of Relic’s work on Company of Heroes 3 as spinning their wheels or resting on their laurels while working toward a new game. He argues the game “sits in between” Relic’s past and its future: “It’s an established game that came out three years ago, but it’s also a way for us to take some chances, experiment a little bit, and while doing that staying really closely connected to the players, That’s what the idea was behind the updates because it was a way to have very quick iterations and touch points with players and provide, honestly, a way for us to fund everything in the future.”
As to what Relic is making next, Dowdeswell wouldn’t say. Though, he revealed trying genres besides real-time strategy was “almost a certainty”, before adding “I don’t think it’s going to be a vast departure for where we are, so it will still be strategic gameplay. We’re not going to go build a racer.”
