Vancouver is a very desirable place to live and work, and like so many such places the cost of living and working can be high. "It's where a lot of the Vancouver studios began," he says, and is only a short distance from the building where Relic was founded. Justin Dowdeswell, Relic's general manager, says the new offices are "not as flash" as the previous space, but it in many ways it is a better fit for the company. "Sega has put a lot of trust and even expectation on the studios to define its future, to plot that course" It is no longer based in the financial district, moving instead to the reclaimed warehouses of Vancouver's Yaletown, a favourite location among the city's many game developers and tech startups. Relic was acquired at auction by Sega, which took over as publisher on Company of Heroes 2, and it is now gearing up for the launch of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III. Five years later, with the eagerly anticipated Company of Heroes 2 in full production, THQ collapsed, and for a brief period of time the future of one of the industry's best strategy developers seemed in doubt. I witnessed the moment when Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts went gold in Relic's offices, on one of the higher floors of a tall glass-and-steel building in the heart of Vancouver's financial district. It was 2007, a time when publishers like THQ would still distribute expansion packs for PC strategy games in physical boxes, building anticipation by flying a dozen or more journalists - many of them working for magazines - all the way to British Columbia, Canada. When I last visited Relic Entertainment, the games industry was a very different place.
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