Brief Analysis of Sales Data between Civ Rev and it possible impact on Civ V

So a big reason that you can't find good data on CiV sales is because it isn't really made publicly available anymore. Steam has always only reported back to the publishers, and now NPD no longer publishes their data. Basically, there is no reliable source anymore, sites like the OPs are dubious at best, and we're forced to hear what the publishers tell us. It's frustrating as a fan who just wants to know how a game is doing, but there is a reason for this. NPD's data was becoming increasingly inaccurate since it didn't properly account for digital downloads, and even when the data was accurate it was leading to situations like my previous post where publishers stocks were becoming wildly volatile with each major release. The "video game industry analyst" groups are a joke, and you combine that with the heavy involvement of day traders in video game stocks and you wind up with massive fluctuations in stock prices based on a single weeks worth of sales for a single game, despite the fact that its all but irrelevant to the bottom line of a company as massive as EA, Activision or even Take Two.

 

There seems to be a rather big drop in sales after the first week, is it because of the disenchantment?

 

No, that's pretty typical, the first weeks sales include all the preorders so they're generally much higher than any subsequent week. A week would be too short a time for word of mouth to have that kind of affect, although bad reviews could. However, with CiV sitting at 90 on Metacritic, that's not much of an issue.

 

A big drop after the first week is normal, especially for high-profile games with a lot of marketing going on. the marketing gets people hyped up to the point that they feel they must have the game nownownownow, this creates the huge number of initial sales. this is also the reason why Steam is an attractive DRM method for publishers: Steam is effective in preventing pre-release pirating, and even if there are just a couple of days between the release and the pirated versions showing up, the publisher's hope is that these few days of non-availability of a pirated copy will increase sales numbers significantly, since it happens exactly at the time when most sales are taking place.

 

how much does it cost to create a game like Civ4/5?
was development of civ5 more expensive than of civ4 or not?

 

Regarding to the charts I posted, its important to understand that its TakeTwo's stock.
TakeTwo is more than just Civilization. It includes Rockstar and 2K and has the following titles :

Spoiler :

* Red Dead Redemption
*
* Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City
* Sid Meier's Civilization V
*
* Mafia II
* NBA 2K11
*
* L.A. Noire
* Max Payne 3
*
* New Carnival Games
*
* NHL 2K11
*
* Borderlands Game of the Year Edition
*
* BioShock 2
* Borderlands
* NBA 2K10
*
* Spec Ops: The Line
*
* Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
* Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
*
* Major League Baseball 2K10
*
* NBA 2K10: Draft Combine
*
* Agent
*
* Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned
* Rockstar Games and Timbaland Present: Beaterator
*
* Grand Theft Auto IV
*
* Midnight Club L.A. Remix
* Midnight Club: Los Angeles
* Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution
*
* BioShock
* Carnival Games
* Wonder Pets! Save the Animals!
*
* Birthday Party Bash
* Carnival Games: Mini-Golf
* Grand Theft Auto
* Grand Theft Auto 2
* NBA 2K9
* NHL 2K10
* Ni Hao, Kai-lan Super Game Day
* Ni Hao, Kai-lan: New Year's Celebration
* Sid Meier's Civilization IV
* The Darkness
* The Warriors
*
* Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
* Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
* Manhunt 2
* Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
* Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization
*
* Don King Boxing
* Don King Presents Prizefighter
* Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Mermaids
* Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Snow Princess
* Dora the Explorer: Dora's World Adventure!
* Dora the Explorer: Journey to the Purple Planet
* Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
* Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
* Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
* Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition
* MLB 2K8 Fantasy All-Stars
* Red Dead Revolver
* Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey
* Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis
* Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Warlords
* The Bigs
* Top Spin 3
*
* Baseball Blast!
* Bully
* BullyВ®: Scholarship Edition
* Ghost Rider
* Grand Theft Auto Advance
* Grand Theft Auto III
* Grand Theft Auto: London 1969
* Mafia
* Major League Baseball 2K9
* Max Payne
* NBA 2K8
* The Bigs 2
* The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
* The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles
*
* All-Pro Football 2K8
* Major League Baseball 2K6
* Major League Baseball 2K7
* Manhunt
* NHL 2K9
*
* College Hoops 2K6
* College Hoops 2K7
* College Hoops 2K8
* ESPN NFL 2K5
* Family Feud
* Family Guy Video Game!
* Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
* Go, Diego, Go! Great Dinosaur Rescue
* Go, Diego, Go! Safari Rescue
* Jade Empire: Special Edition
* Major League Baseball 2K8
* Midnight Club II
* MLB 2K9 Fantasy All-Stars
* MLB Front Office Manager
* NBA 2K6
* NHL 2K7
* NHL 2K8
*
* NBA 2K7
* NHL 2K6
*
* CivCity: Rome
* Close Combat: First to Fight
*
* 24: The Game
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
* Deal or No Deal
* Dungeon Siege II: Broken World
* Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony
* Midnight Club Street Racing
* MLB Power Pros
* MLB Power Pros 2008
* MLB Stickball
* MLB Superstars
* Oni
* Prey
* Serious Sam II
* Shattered Union
* Sid Meier's Railroads!
* Smuggler's Run Warzones
* State of Emergency
* Stronghold
* Stronghold 2
* Stronghold Crusader
* Stronghold Legends
* The Da Vinci Code
* The Italian Job
* Thrasher: Skate and Destroy
* Top Spin
* Top Spin 2
* Vietcong 2
* Wild Metal
* World Poker Tour
* Zathura
*
* Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
* Conflict: Global Terror
* Sid Meier's Pirates!
* Smuggler's Run
* Smuggler's Run 2: Hostile Territory

So I doubt there are huge impacts on the charts even from a flagship as Civilization.

The reason for showing them was to illustrate the huge drop (that almost all the stocks took) from 26'ish (sep '08) to 7.5'ish (dec '08) dropping around 350% and not really recovering that well.

The second chart I posted because I thought people might be interested in seeing the last period more detailed, and as mentioned by another poster that the drops in august are not as dramatic as in '08 (though 20% in a couple of days is still a mega drop, and not a stock I would ever touch as a daytrader.)

 

The reason for Take-Two's plunge in stock value in 2008 didn't have anything to do with the general economic crisis (well, not directly anyway). That was when EA rescinded their buyout offer for the company, which caused an immediate crash in the stock prices. It was big news at the time, check out this news article from here at CivFanatics: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=287802

EA offered to buy at $25 per share, and the price quickly fell to about $6 per share. I still maintain that Take-Two is one of the worst publishers in the business. They have a huge stable of bigname titles (Grand Theft Auto, Bioshock, Mafia, RedDead, all the 2k sports games) and they still struggle to turn a consistent profit. Given that two different CEOs have been ousted in the past decade for corporate fraud, Take-Two doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation for management.

 

Well, it does follow practically every stock on the market.

The chart is dow jones, S&P and nasdaq showing almost identical curve. (but with a lot better recovery)

 

If you are going to include Revolution with the series you should also include the remake of Colonization. It was even more bugged than Civ 5 upon release and gave a very good glimpse of the future. I remember playing it and wondering what was in store with their next release. For me it's been not just one bad Civilization release from them, but two in a row on the PC.

 

Is that including Ben Feder, CEO of TakeTwo, who announced friday that he wanted to travel around asia with his family?

 

Haha, i love how we (thats me too), log on to our accounts get some data here and some data there, and pretend that we are experts on everything.
Look at the OP, he got this data, and made a his point.... He probably felt good about his point too, and if the data supported it, it would of been valid. But he mis-read the data and now we get some stock charts, to support CiV sales.....

 

If someone would have did a comprehensive poll that ask a few question only exclusively to people who have played all of the Civ games (1-5), and ask which one was the best. I would not be surprised to see cIV winning the most votes.

I think it only can work if the poll was not only submitted in this forum, but other forums as well since one can't be sufficient enough as well as arguably be highly accurate.

 

IF you want a good survey/poll, you wouldn't do forums at all.

 

Reagarding info on www.vgchartz.com - their data for PC sales are extrapolated from polling 2% of retail shops and 0% of digital distribution services(Steam, D2D etc. dont release their sales numbers), so I dont see any reson to take any of their data seriously.

 

These are series I'm intimately familiar with as well, and I agree on both counts. However - I'm not sure they help your case.

The Total War series started to suffer when they went from a province-based campaign map to small tiles. imo, the AI couldn't handle it and the game got boring. Complication ruined the game. (But I still have hope for the future!) Empire's new detail in the campaign map may appeal to some, but others find it tedious.
They also went too far in trying to satisfy the historical accuracy crowd. The forums literally have complaints about the number of buttons on a soldier's uniform! So we get dozens of "unique units" that are nearly indistinguishable in game terms and add nothing but clutter. Shogun and Medieval 1 had nicely differentiated units, and were simple enough for the AI to do well with.

Same thing in SimCity. It got more and more complicated to the point of overwhelming the user and drowning out the fun little things, to the point of collapse. They tried to save it with SimCity Societies, one of the most boring games I have ever played - it was far too simple. (You didn't zone anymore... you placed the exact buildings you wanted.) They never returned to the happy medium that was SimCity 2000. I'd say Master of Orion 3 did the same.

I thought Civ IV was pretty good. Maybe a tad bit overcomplicated but it was mostly in how the information was presented - maybe UI improvements would've been enough.
(On the other hand, I always got bored in the late game with all the units driving around... I really, really prefer the late game in Civ V.)

 

Regarding the scarcity of data, apparently even Soren himself did not know exactly how well Civ4 sold

Some interesting tidbits

Approximate sales (Add-ons and bundles included)
civ1: 1 million
civ2: 1.5 million
civ3: 2 million
civ4: 3 million

Is appears plausible and consistent with the state of the game at release that the Civ5 development team wasn't swimming in money, either

 

Well I don't know; I think that very often management focusses on the next marginal user rather than the established base. Management is often judged not by sales level but by the new sales.

I'd imagine that just about everyone on this site purchased CiV (and many of them are unhappy about it). So the established base becomes a given and the only question is how to attract the next user. To be fair Civ4 hit such a (beautifully) high complexity level that I do know some people who were turned off before they could get fully immersed in the game. (My persistent rantings often made them reconsider - you're welcome 2K/Firaxis). That could be a real problem for a new game.

Nevertheless, I intend to send the only message that I can (and that they'll listen to) that my purchase is not guaranteed by withholding my purchase of Civ5 and its DLC and its expansion packs unless I get genuine positive feedback.

 

It's pretty damning that in the first ever civ 5 diety succession game, led by none other than sullla, a player actually quit the roster because the game is just too tedious...

 

The stock market has no more sales data than you have. You will find that graph of take twos value mirrors the stockmarket as a whole (ie, very little to do with company performance)

Thread is filled with conjecture and is rather pointless.

 

EU1 -> EU2 -> EU3 -> To infinity and beyond !