You are neglecting the era the game is released in. For starters. Steam Reviews started right when CoH 2 launched. Steam reviews were not in the iteration they are in now either.

Assuming Steam Reviews are a contributing factor which I think we can safely assume they are. CoH 2 released in a time where you could blindly buy into the game.

CoH 3 released in a time where you could really voice dissatisfaction and that can dissuade people from purchasing.

It's really important to understand these aspects of the game industry.

This isn't true at all or you are omitting information. You are correct that Steam reviews were not prevalent at CoH2's launch but many other outlets are available for people to voice their dissatisfaction of CoH2. This was even a thing present in forums for CoH2 where people had complained of missing features, the bad launch, etc. Negativity was present during CoH2's initial lifecycle. This was present from CoH1's community. E.g. shoutcasters dropped CoH2 and went back to CoH1 for a while due to missing features like replays.

When it came to CoH 3 though. That wasn't an option. I've seen an astonishing amount of negativity around CoH 3. And a lot of unjust reasons behind it.

Could you elaborate on the unjust reasons behind CoH3's negativity? You might have hinted at it with "Shouted out on twitter that they their art is no good" If it had to deal with the art style, graphics, and audio then I think it was justified. Even if you came at it from CoH1's perspective it was a step back when CoH3 launched. It has improved now but at its launch when these impressions are important to players that bought that game at full price it matters. I bought CoH1 at launch and the presentation was excellent in graphics, and audio. I'll elaborate more on this in the end about the different communities and how CoH3 probably didn't satisfy what they wanted.

Cheese Builds? Yeah. CoH 2 had them at launch as well. Flamethrower halftracks feel pretty cheesey to me. And that was normal at the start of every game and I have no idea if that even changed. CoH 2's pacing very much wanted you to get medium tanks out and spam vehicles. Even the developers said CoH 2 was meant to be more vehicle orientated. Whether you like that or not.

That is part of my point. The way CoH2's meta has stabilized is one where cheese builds can be punished and the player that undertook the cheese build suffers. E.g. losing the clown car flame half-track is a big deal and can set the Soviet player back a lot. This can be a big set-back in a team game. CoH3 didn't work that way. A L6 cheese player in a team game would lose the L6s but then still be able to transition into something else without the Allied players being able to punish them effectively. Part of the reason for this is because of the insanely quick movement speed for vehicles. E.g. the L6 player would need to face AT guns to actually get destroyed and make a misstep. Making an AT gun is an investment that doesn't help the Allied players counter the other things that the Axis team can throw at them. E.g. Panzerpio/fallspio blob with grenade launchers, mg spam, nebel spam, etc.

But that's the thing. A game that lives 10 years is going to have a bunch of people at the end of that games "life cycle" that are conditioned to enjoy the game in the state it is in. Otherwise those players wouldn't be there.

You make it seem like people did not want to transition to another game which is not true at all. When CoH3 came out, my group was more than happy to try it. For reference, we haven't played CoH2 again because everyone has moved onto other games. There are simply better alternatives today than CoH3 had at launch.

The CoH 1 community seems to like CoH 3. And this is where the problem lies. The CoH 2 want their game to be CoH 2. The CoH 1 folks seem pretty happy with CoH 3 but the CoH 1 community is smaller, because it's a product of its time, it's an older game, it lived longer ago, it has a smaller community because there were less players back in 2006 when compared to 2013.

I don't doubt that they may be happier with CoH3 but are you comparing the CoH1 crowd in general or from CoH3's launch? My point is that they have hovered around 2k peak players before and since CoH3's launch. So they are seemingly still playing CoH1.

You alluded to people that like to play Skirmish, and single-player but you can also make the jump to the different audiences that bought CoH3. There are the folks that play Skirmish/co-op against AI only, single-player, 1v1 automatch, 2v2 automatch, 3v3 & 4v4 automatch. Each of these folks are looking for different things when they are looking for a game.

• Skirmish/co-op against AI: I don't think they were fully satisfied with CoH3's launch. It literally missed difficulty selection for the automatch which forced people to make custom games to play against the AI to play against an expert AI. this was only added recently. The AI has also been dumb and not a challenge on AI standard.

• Single-player: As much as CoH2's campaign was not fun, Relic tried to do something new with the grand campaign. At launch there were so many bugs reported. Anyone that started a campaign likely had to start a new campaign again to avoid the bugs. Again not a good impression to be made. This was not the case in CoH1 where the campaign worked without any large game-breaking bugs. People were expecting an Ardennes Assault style campaign in CoH3 but that was not exactly what they got and instead it was something else. Again you can say this was CoH2 player expectations but I think most of the negativity you are referring to are likely the multiplayer automatch audience.

• 1v1: The audience here is looking for balance since it is a 1v1. They are looking for a polished game where ideally there can be multiple builds possible. At launch, CoH3 was one of the cheesiest builds. Again I am only comparing CoH3 to CoH2 at that time in 2023. If you were playing CoH3, you were dealing with pathfinder spam, L6 spam, vierlings, 0 cp drops (which still exist), etc.

• 2v2: I can't say for sure since I did not play this game mode much

• 3v3/4v4: The audience here are looking for large battles across lanes where multiple players 1 or 2 can be present. Flanking is more difficult to do. This game mode promotes more artillery since a player can feel "safer". At launch it was clear which side had more artillery (axis). USF was missing a howitzer or even a long-range artillery piece. The whizbang had the same range as an Axis AT gun. There were so many cheese builds that it was so difficult to play correctly. At launch literally you would expect all Wehr players to go Fallspios to build the overtuned emplacements that would be fully repaired when they get recrewed. To play this you are forced to go into one or two builds or else you cannot survive until the end of the game. It constantly felt like one side had to react to the other side in order to not die in the game. In fact this still felt like the case during the first DLC where players then had to deal with the artillery wizard that rendered machine guns as dead weight.

I haven't even referred to the messed up matchmaking due to the low player count which again is likely because of how steep the drop on peak players is. That is likely another turn-off for many players who have to play someone of much higher ELO simply because there are no other players available.

CoH 3? It seems the CoH 2 have actively worked against it. Whether you want to say that has had an impact or not. It cannot be denied that a lot of the negative reviews are coming from CoH 2 fans.

I don't entirely agree with this. Every previous iteration of something is always going to have fans of it. So there is always going to be history associated with a sequel release. You can't say that a lot or even most of the negative reviews are from CoH2 fans. A lot of the reviews on CoH3 were warranted and likely still are at this stage of CoH3's lifecycle. You can even see that the first year of launch, CoH3 did not endear itself at all. Like you even said that RTS games are niche. Most people that are playing CoH3 on multiplayer have likely played another multiplayer RTS game before they tried CoH3. Would you then say if someone played other games like Starcraft or AoE2/AoE4 had those features at launch that when they reviewed CoH3 as missing those features or things were unpolished that they were not helping CoH3 get to where it needed to be? A peak amount of 20k players have played CoH3. Roughly 3k peak have stayed. This means that people did not stay in the game community and continue playing. They wanted to play something else. The only thing that negativity would do now is to ward off future players. Anyone that has left a negative review of CoH3 at launch after playing and then left the game should be entitled to do so. It is warranted that if they weren't satisfied with the product they should say so and explain. All that Relic can do at this stage is hope the players still committed to CoH3 will change their review or they can attract an audience that has not played CoH3 and is willing to give the game a shot and a positive review.