Sega lays off 121 Relic employees

Stop playing COD and go play a boring RTS ya chuds.

Sega lays off 121 employees at Company of Heroes studio Relic Entertainment

To "ensure maximum focus is placed on our core franchises."

Sega has laid off 121 employees at Company of Heroes and Age of Empires 4 studio Relic Entertainment, blaming "external factors [that] are challenging our industry more than ever".

Confirmation of job cuts at the Canada-based developer, which has been part of Sega since its acquisition in 2013, came via a statement shared on Twitter.

"Relic Entertainment and Sega Europe want to share the difficult news that our studio has been impacted by layoffs, affecting 121 employees," Relic wrote. "This comes at a time when external factors are challenging our industry more than ever, and we made this decision to restructure our organisation to ensure maximum focus is placed on our core franchises."

"Relic and Sega remain fully committed to supporting and investing in our titles, including the recently released Company of Heroes 3," the statement continued. "We're confident that following this necessary restructuring, Relic will be in a position of strength to continue delivering outstanding experiences to players all over the world."

"This decision was incredibly difficult," the developer concluded. "Relic is a studio that treasures our people and is proud of the culture we've grown, and right now our focus is on supporting departing employees in every way we can. We would like to offer our sincerest thanks to each of them for the part they've played in making Relic such a special studio."

Today's news marks the latest in a wave of job cuts across the games industry, with Unity, Microsoft, Take-Two, Riot Games, EA, Twitch, Meta, CD Projekt, and Ubisoft all having announced layoffs in the last few months.

Good news. I was told that a company being the most profitable it can be, is the most important concern for gamers. 😉

But for the rational not corporate shills that are still around, this is awful news.

Meanwhile Nintendo dev teams continue to grow and get massive raises all aboard.

The struggle is real!

Was one of the last big RTS studios around and I still really enjoy AOE IV and COH 3 was fun with friends.

Oh Canada, makes sense.

Unfortunate for the former devs hope they get work soon.

But honestly it is understandable, Relic been on a string of misses. 40k dawn of war 3 was a complete bust. Age of Empires 4 and Company of Heroes 3 didnt set the world on fire.

@sakaixx: problem is Relic can't make the new games better than the ones before it.

Dawn of War 3 was a big miss, way worse than 2 and 1. Tried Moba lane style.. did not work

CH3 is worse than CH2... So none of the fans were happy with that

new AOE was the most solid out of all of them.

Don't have any real complaints about it.

But yeah, people expect the sequels to be better than the 10 years old games that came out before them...

@sargentd: Agreed. None of these games are bad, but they haven't raised their "game".

Wow, one of, if not my favorite rts developer. Hopefully they can continue to make great games with this cut-down team.

Selling games has that effect on the industry…

@ghostofgolden: Someone should tell Sega that.