y is sup commander more famous then CoH

There are a number of factors to look at when trying to determine why one game is more famous than another, mainly it is to do with the previous titles that were developed:

Company of Hero's had Dawn of War as its predecessor and came out about a year or 2 before it. Now Dawn of war is a good game that hit it off quite well all round but because people had been playing it for so long before Company of Hero's (well dawn of war and its two add-ons) people tended to look at it and go "oh look another dawn of war game...." and just not getting to excited by the prospect.

Now then Supreme Commanders Prequel was Total Annihilation, now that was a game i thought was great, it was new (when it came out) different and had lots of variations in unit. The main point here though is that it is old! So old now that trying to get your hands on a working copy is almost impossible (or stupidly expensive) and as such people have stopped playing there copies of it a fair time ago.  When people seen Supreme Commander they thought back to Total Annihilation and remembered the good times that they had playing it (well i know i did) so thought that it would be well worth the purchase.    

Though both titles had a basis of a big game to build upon it is only Supreme Commander that can boast that it is a sequel to a game that people loved, which they haven't played in a very long time and has an excellent variation in units. It wouldn't have mattered if there was huge advertisements for Company of Hero's all Supreme Commander had to say was remember Total Annihilation, and if i was given a choice which game to get after that it would be Supreme Commander!

1) Scale (HUGE!)

2) Variety (loads of units).

3)Chris Taylors name on it?

1) Scale (HUGE!)

2) Variety (loads of units).

3)Chris Taylors name on it?

Supcom is a spiritual sequel to one of the greatest rts games ever conceived, total annihilation. The fanbase is HUGE.

Company of heroes is an awesome game but it is relatively low key due to a sneaky release and has been drowned in the 'just another ww2 rts' swamp due to it's very nature. 

coh got very little hype leading up to and on release, it didn't sell too great if I recall due to this poor marketing either.nutcrackr

You recall incorrectly. 

Few reasons, one Supreme Commander is newer then Company of Heroes, it is arguable though whether this hinders or helps the current online player count, but most likely I'd say this helps as games sell the most at launch and it can take a couple months for the popularity to fade, I don't have Company of Heroes, but if I had to guess I would think it would have been more popular online 3 months after it came out then it is right now.

Hype wise I actually don't think CoH was is a inferior position to Supreme Commander, sure supcom had more hype before it came out, but a good amount of that hype and sales went out the window when people saw the demo ran like crap, thats not even to mention the fact that the demo did a awful job of introducing you to the game, I mean the dam tutorials were videos and they had to be downloaded? Not to mention they weren't available to days after the demo launched.

Quite simply GPG failed massively on the Supcom demo because with no proper tutorial introduction most impatient people  got the impression that it took forever to build an army because they had no clue what a proper build order was as Supcom does build orders far different then other RTS games. So people in the demo ended up making units at the pace of 1 or so a minute when they should have been pushing out 10 or 20 a minute.

You can still see the damage the games poor tutorial setup has done to this day with people citing the games slow speed as the reason they didn't get the game and didn't like it when in fact it's probably the fastest RTS game ever made.

The other big issue was the demo's awful performance, in the latest Supreme Commander patch the performance has skyrocketed to the point I'd say the demo probably runs as well on a FX62 8800GTS 2 GB as a 3200XP 7800GT 1GB ram run on the games latest build. 

Furthermore if you just look at the sale history Supcom and CoH have been at nearly identical places on the top 20 sellers for each month

Supcom 1st month was rank 4 Second month Rank 8 3rd month rank 16

CoH was in the exact same places the 1st and second month, the 3rd month it was actually in 14th.