🍪 Analyxyz: Relic Entertainment’s Speedrun to Survival After Sega
The creators of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War want to build smaller, smarter, faster — before time runs out.
Hello there, developers and RTS survivors. Today, Game Cookies goes deep into GamesIndustry.Biz’s feature by Lewis Packwood, where Justin Dowdeswell, CEO of Relic Entertainment, lays out how the legendary Company of Heroes and Dawn of War studio plans to rebuild itself after splitting from Sega.
Now backed by Emona Capital LLP and standing on its own, Relic’s trying to do what few veteran studios have survived doing: make games faster, cheaper, and actually relevant again.
🧭 From Giant to Survivor
When Company of Heroes 3 launched unfinished in 2023, fans didn’t rage because it was terrible — they raged because it could’ve been great. Relic’s ambition ballooned beyond what it could polish, and SEGA’s attention wandered to its shiny new acquisition, Rovio Entertainment .
🎙️ Justin Dowdeswell: “We aimed too high, didn’t meet the bar, and didn’t take the time to get it there before launching it.”
🦊 Kiki: You almost never hear this kind of honesty anymore. Most devs drop a buggy launch and go, “Actually, players just didn’t get our vision.”
So credit where it’s due — admitting fault in 2025 is like finding loot in a chest you already looted. Still, “we aimed too high” is classic studio code for “we ran out of time, budget, and emotional stability.”
It’s the same loop: years building the perfect muzzle flash, zero time left for QA. And Sega ditching them after buying Rovio? Brutal. That’s like your boss saying, “We’re shifting from realistic war sims to mobile bird physics. Good luck.”
🍪 Chip watches a paper bird hit a wall and slowly slides out of frame.⚙️ Smaller Teams, Faster Loops
⚙️ Smaller Teams, Faster Loops
Relic’s new “Relic Labs” runs four-week prototype sprints with small teams. The idea: rapid tests, early failures, cheaper lessons.
🎙️ Dowdeswell: “Seeing the teams achieve it multiple times has built a new belief — that it’s actually possible.”
🦊 Kiki: Four weeks? Some AAA studios need four weeks just to book the kickoff meeting. But I like it — pressure makes creativity. When you’ve got one month, suddenly you stop pitching open-world RTS with 10,000 units and just ask, “What’s actually fun?”
Though, let’s be real — “belief” doesn’t ship games. Half of game dev is convincing yourself the deadline is a myth until it kills you.
🍪 Chip flips a calendar page… only to reveal another deadline underneath.
💻 Fixing the Engine Graveyard
Relic spent years rebuilding its tech from scratch for each game — losing progress, tools, and sanity every cycle. Now, Dowdeswell says they’re finally keeping one living, evolving engine across projects.
🎙️ Dowdeswell: “It’s a new discipline we have to instill in everyone — to make sure we don’t take longer than we need to.”
🦊 Kiki: I swear, every studio does this. “Let’s make a brand-new engine — this time we’ll document it.” Five years later, the only documentation is a 2017 Slack message that says ‘ask Tom’.
What Relic’s doing now is the boring hero work: version discipline. Nobody celebrates it, but it’s the difference between “shipping” and “remembering how shaders worked last time.”
🍪 Chip opens an old hard drive labeled ‘final_final_v3_DO_NOT_DELETE’ — and faints.
🤖 AI: The Not-So-Magic Button
Dowdeswell sees AI as a helper, not a savior. It should handle busywork — not replace developers.
🎙️ Dowdeswell: “It’s not about replacing people — it’s about taking the annoying things off the list and getting them done more quickly.”
🦊 Kiki: Yeah, that’s how it starts. “Just let the AI do the boring stuff.” Next thing you know, it’s pitching a battle pass idea at the company meeting.
But he’s right about one thing — AI’s great for what I call “creative chores.” Summaries, bug logs, placeholder names — sure. Just don’t let it write lore. We’ve seen what happens when ChatGPT tries to describe emotion: ‘Commander feels sadness.exe’.
🍪 Chip hands an AI model a coffee mug that says “You are not my producer.”
🧠 RTS Needs a New Brain, Not Just a New Skin
Dowdeswell wants to make strategy games more accessible — lower the “cognitive load,” bring in new players, but keep the core intact.
🎙️ Dowdeswell: “Relic can chart the course for where the genre goes — understanding modern player behaviour is key.”
🦊 Kiki: “Understanding modern player behaviour” — translation: people have the attention span of a TikTok loop. You can’t drop a 40-minute tutorial anymore. If your game doesn’t pop off in the first 10 seconds, players alt-tab to YouTube.
The real innovation in RTS won’t come from better pathfinding — it’ll come from making your grandma understand why flanking matters. Relic’s challenge isn’t making RTS modern. It’s making it digestible without dumbing it down.
🍪 Chip stares at 50 control groups, cries, and builds one farm instead.
💰 The AAA Detox
Dowdeswell admits it: AAA budgets are imploding.
🎙️ Dowdeswell: “The economics no longer work — and it’s led us down dark alleys as an industry.”
🦊 Kiki: You know it’s bad when CEOs start talking like they’re in therapy. “Dark alleys,” “new discipline,” “rediscovery of self.” This isn’t a studio, it’s a midlife crisis with render pipelines.
But he’s right — budgets are out of control. We hit a point where games cost more than movies but sell fewer copies than a mobile gacha banner. Maybe smaller projects aren’t a downgrade — maybe they’re a detox.
🍪 Chip meditates next to a burning pile of invoices.
🧩 Tools That Help You Build Faster (Without Losing Your Mind)
If you’re trying to survive the new dev era like Relic:
- 🧠 Gridly — The sanity saver for localization and content sync. Keeps everyone speaking the same language — literally.
- 🧰 Plastic SCM — Your version control won’t implode when someone adds 300 GB of terrain textures.
- 🎨 Figma + FIGJAM — Because nobody wants to open the engine just to argue about button colors.
- 📊 Notion + Jira — Track chaos, then pretend it’s organized.
- 🧩 Perforce Software Helix Core — Handles files like a tank.
- 🧪 PlaytestCloud — Playtests without begging your friends.
- 🤖 ChatGPT / Claude — Use them as assistants, not oracles.
⚙️ Stay lean like Relic. Keep grounded like Dowdeswell. And remember: Sega traded real-time tactics for Angry Birds — proof that not every flight path leads to victory.
