Company Of Heroes Servers Moving May 7th To Steam Platform

Since THQ went bankrupt a while back, the future of Company of Heroes became uncertain. SEGA have since bought the franchise and the servers for the game are now being moved as a result of the change in ownership. Originally Relic Entertainment had a hosting plan for the Company of Heroes game servers with Quazal but now they are moving them over to Steamworks servers as part of SEGA’s plans.

For anyone who regularly plays Company of Heroes or follows the game, this will be old news to you. However, a lot of people still don’t know about the transition. The transition put simply means any existing owners of Company of Heroes will be able to redeem all their original Company of Heroes keys in Steam to get access to a Steam Version of the game that includes whatever they had keys for (The base version, Opposing Fronts, Tales of Valor). In essence your game will be no different and you will be able to keep everything you previously had, it will just be moved onto Steam. After May the 7th the old versions of the game will no longer work online because the game essentially needs to be modified to work through the Steam servers and Steamworks platform, not through Relic Online.

This is where the New Steam Version comes in. Unfortunately, you have to re-download the entire game even if you already have a copy in Steam. This is because the new version of the game is altered dramatically to link your Steam account to the Company of Heroes stats, and cosmetically you now get a SEGA video clip in the loading screen instead of THQ one. One thing to point out for Company of Heroes regulars is that the accounts are directly linked to your Steam account, this means “Smurfing”, or the art of remaking your account over and over to appear like a “n00b”, is no longer possible. Unless of course you want to buy a new copy of the game and make a new Steam account every time. Also changing your in-game name is now done via Steam’s name function, not via the game.

In effect Company of Heroes will become totally integrated into your Steam account. The transition for Company of Heroes players should be simple if you already play it through Steam. If you don’t then you NEED Steam to play online. Without it you will only be able to access Single Player.

There are a lot more details on switching over here on the Company of Heroes community forums. You can criticise this decision but it was kind of inevitable that something was going to change when THQ went bankrupt. I personally am happy the online servers have continued and think its better they are with Steam than not online at all. What are your thoughts?

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