Long Term Support For Civ 7

[Albertan Civfanatic]

I think Civ 7 should continue to be supported by Firaxis with updates, patches and DLC like all previous mainline Civ games. The game is truly good, if flawed though this is not insurmountable to fix. There are so many people on Steam decrying the death of this game as if it is an already accomplished fact. Don't they understand that every new Civ game gets treated as the worst thing ever created until after the first yerar of patches and the inevitable DLC? I think people should just be patient, learn the mechanics and enjoy the game.
What does everyone else think about the long term future of 7?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I don't see any reason for the game to not be fully supported with DLC, expansions and patches like previous civ games. I expect 2 expansions to come out in their time.

 

[itix]

The future of Civ 7 is shaped by its revenues and revenue potential. No matter how disliked it is, no matter how few players there are, but they sold ~1.2 - 1.5 million copies. There is a huge potential for an expansion and they are going to try it out.

If they fail, it will be the end of Civ 7. If they succeed, Civ7 gets further updates and expansions/DLCs.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The future of Civ 7 is shaped by its revenues and revenue potential. No matter how disliked it is, no matter how few players there are, but they sold ~1.2 - 1.5 million copies. There is a huge potential for an expansion and they are going to try it out.

If they fail, it will be the end of Civ 7. If they succeed, Civ7 gets further updates and expansions/DLCs.

One of the things here is that Civilization games always have long sale cycle and this affects not only base game, but expansions as well. People who buy the game on release at full price are few and the same goes with expansions, so it would be really hard to say whether they expansion is success or not within its first year... which is usually when second expansion comes out.

Also, I've pointed it out multiple times, the economics of such games is usually made so cost/income ratio for the base game is bad, is much better for expansions and fantastic for DLCs, which actually pay for the game. So even the game overall doesn't work great, DLCs and expansions are usually good thing to do. Even if they don't make the game profitable, they make it less losing.

 

[McSpank01]

One of the things here is that Civilization games always have long sale cycle and this affects not only base game, but expansions as well. People who buy the game on release at full price are few and the same goes with expansions, so it would be really hard to say whether they expansion is success or not within its first year... which is usually when second expansion comes out.

Also, I've pointed it out multiple times, the economics of such games is usually made so cost/income ratio for the base game is bad, is much better for expansions and fantastic for DLCs, which actually pay for the game. So even the game overall doesn't work great, DLCs and expansions are usually good thing to do. Even if they don't make the game profitable, they make it less losing.

I think this all depends on whether people actually buy the DLCs. A continuing trend of players not bothering with the latest DLC is a signal to the developer that they may need to end support for a game early.

Game support and continuing development is expensive and if there is little sign that it is going to ultimately turn into paying customers then it will stop.

 

[Siptah]

This should probably go into the stats thread but:

1m+ sold copies is a solid but not great base. And if I look at the gamalytic numbers, which says 1m copies and average concurrent players since release are 7.2k. Hence, the rate of active players of 0.72% isn't bad.

CK3 sits at 0.38%
Civ VI sits at 0.36%
EUIV sits at 0.28%
AoE2 DE sits at 0.20%
Stellaris sits at 0.15 %
Civ V sits at 0.10%
Old World sits at 0.10%
Humankind sits at 0.04%
Beyond Earth sits at 0.02%
Now, of course this isn't in any way clean, as the games were released so long ago, and civ 7 just recently.

But if we look at undoubtedly successful games that were released in the same time frame as civ 7:
KCD2 sits at 0.41%
Expedition 33 sits at 0.40%
Monster Hunter Wilds sits at 0.39%

Again, this is not really clean, because these game likely have a way larger console audience. Yet, I don't see why console players should play the games they own more or less often than steam owners. I know that long-term, the different genres will make a difference for retention, but so far, I'm actually surprised to see them that low.

So, it seems that the game is played by its owners to a satisfying degree. It just doesn't have that many owners yet. In other words: at some point, FXS need to find more owners to keep up the support, and not necessarily improve the game for the people that are already owning it and play it . These owners and players can probably be seduced to buy DLCs with shiny things if marketing is clever, as it was the case for civ VI as well. The first larger discount (just now) increased the player base, but then again, not by that much.

 

[ColtSeavers]

I think Civ 7 should continue to be supported by Firaxis with updates, patches and DLC like all previous mainline Civ games. The game is truly good, if flawed though this is not insurmountable to fix. There are so many people on Steam decrying the death of this game as if it is an already accomplished fact. Don't they understand that every new Civ game gets treated as the worst thing ever created until after the first yerar of patches and the inevitable DLC? I think people should just be patient, learn the mechanics and enjoy the game.
What does everyone else think about the long term future of 7?

I think Civ 7 will get one more DLC. If the reviews and sales figures don’t improve significantly by then, they’ll likely stop developing further content for it. Let alone for the Ages/ Civ Switching, a significant amount of former players probably will not buy this game, previous Civ titles didn't carry a burden like this, therefore I'm not very optimistic about its future.

 

[marius_kaparius]

One things I'd like the game to lean into game going forward are scenarios that lean into the narrative aspect. Imagine playing some kind of war scenario but seeing the letters exchanged with loved ones and rivals and then choosing responses that actually impact your Commander's abilities / AI behaviors.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think this all depends on whether people actually buy the DLCs. A continuing trend of players not bothering with the latest DLC is a signal to the developer that they may need to end support for a game early.

We know that previous minimal sale and RtR release propelled Civ7 to Steam Top-100 even though significant amount of players already had RtR from Founder's Edition (about 1/3 of presales were FE, based on early achievements data). I guess this means DLC sales went quite good and were one of the reasons for 2K optimistic comments.

Game support and continuing development is expensive and if there is little sign that it is going to ultimately turn into paying customers then it will stop.

Yes, but much less expensive than the original game development, that's the point

This should probably go into the stats thread but:

1m+ sold copies is a solid but not great base. And if I look at the gamalytic numbers, which says 1m copies and average concurrent players since release are 7.2k. Hence, the rate of active players of 0.72% isn't bad

As usual, I hiss on the numbers interpretation.

1. Gamalytics had the same 1M estimation on release. They based it on the initial number of simultaneous players, with huge margin of error and haven't updated since. So, with continued sales (and we have a lot of indications that sales process didn't stop), the current number of owners should be higher, although the margin of error should be much bigger.
2. Gamalytics analyzed Steam sales only - that's ok if you compare with other Steam metrics, but is underestimation if you try analyzing the game success
3. Simultaneous number of players is not the same as number of active players. The correlation between those metrics depends on how many hours per week those active players spend on a game, which, in turn, depends on many things like time from release or the gameplay itself. For example, it hypothetically possible that era system caused many players to split their games more than with previous civ games, resulting them in spending less time per week.

So, I don't think there's anything useful data here for us until 2K or Firaxis will want to share more.

P.S. One of the important and sad thing about those publicly available metrics is that data is money and we can't expect Steam to share any commercially valuable numbers for free. Something which would allow reliably estimate other company sales is 100% commercially valuable.

 

[Gori the Grey]

So, I don't think there's anything useful data here for us until 2K or Firaxis will want to share more.

All we know is that, from their own point of view, initial sales were disappointing.

Whatever number they had for their projected sales (p), and whatever is the actual number of actual sales (a), p < a.

 

[stealth_nsk]

All we know is that, from their own point of view, initial sales were disappointing.

Whatever number they had for their projected sales (p), and whatever is the actual number of actual sales (a), p < a.

From their words, they have:

1. Record presales
2. Slow start
3. Projected LTV still go within expectations

If we rule out straight lies, it paints a pretty consistent picture. Presales were exceeding expectations, but the wave of negative reviews greatly affected further sales. However, the sales of the base game were still coming and the DLC sales shown that people who purchased the game don't abandon it.

 

[Gori the Grey]

On the larger issue of the thread, I think they're committed to the game, at least through the first expansion.

Game released unfinished-patch and balance-expansion-expansion (DLCs along the way) has become their financial model for this game, so they suspend their final financial judgment until it has gone through that cycle, or the better part of it.

 

[Crashdummy]

One expansion will have for certain. I supposed then it will depend on how the expansion sells. If it sells bad, then maybe this game ends like Beyond Earth. If it has good sales, then it will continue to have development

 

[Siptah]

1. Gamalytics had the same 1M estimation on release. They based it on the initial number of simultaneous players, with huge margin of error and haven't updated since. So, with continued sales (and we have a lot of indications that sales process didn't stop), the current number of owners should be higher, although the margin of error should be much bigger.

Just to be clear on this: they update their numbers once a day. It had 1M at release, with a huge error margin. Then their mean estimate went down to 800k and now slowly back up to 1M. The error margin is still huge, but that's for almost all games. It's not exact science on gamalytic, it's more like guesses I would say (and I'm quite used to work with noisy data for example). And some of these don't have remotely make sense, as I've also shown previously on these forums.

1. Gamalytics analyzed Steam sales only - that's ok if you compare with other Steam metrics, but is underestimation if you try analyzing the game success

I'm not analyzing success at all. I'm making a comparison between retention numbers on steam, and steam only.

1. Simultaneous number of players is not the same as number of active players. The correlation between those metrics depends on how many hours per week those active players spend on a game, which, in turn, depends on many things like time from release or the gameplay itself. For example, it hypothetically possible that era system caused many players to split their games more than with previous civ games, resulting them in spending less time per week.

There's also a metric for how many different players opened the game in the past week, but I have my reasons, why I rather go with "how many of the all time owners have been playing concurrently on average throughout the game's life span". All of these are flawed, and describing the metric i used like this already makes it obvious that it also has its flaws, and should be taken with care. If we look at active players, we see that roughly a 10th of owners played the game recently – leading to the same conclusion in my eyes: the key to "growth" is more owners, not people that already own it playing the game more.

 

[Xandinho]

I want this game to have long-term support, because despite its genuinely frustrating flaws in several areas, I still consider it a good game. However, that depends on its long-term commercial success, which in turn relies on their ability to bring back a large part of the franchise’s fan base into it. And I feel that this will only happen if they release a classic mode—or at least something that comes close to it.