Looks like Firaxis has two options....

[Camikaze]

I doubt there will be any expansions for this - it's most likely standalone, just like the remake of Colonization using the Civ IV engine. IMO we can expect patches at best.

We already know there will be DLC, and given the intensity of the marketing effort to sell this game and the fact that it's being played by a lot of people, I think it's more reasonable to expect that this will be more than just a Colonization style stopgap.

 

[Lord Tirian]

We already know there will be DLC, and given the intensity of the marketing effort to sell this game and the fact that it's being played by a lot of people, I think it's more reasonable to expect that this will be more than just a Colonization style stopgap.

Good point, this was probably their strongest and most intensive marketing campaign yet, they really do want it to succeed.

 

[Mustakrakish]

We all compare BE to a prefected, polished Civ5 BNW, just as we compared Civ5 vanilla to a perfected, polished Civ4 BtS.

Yes, and it's exactly what we should do.

BtS to vanilla Civ5 is one thing. Totally new game, everything is different, "built from scratch" so to say. BNW to BE? Essentially a reskin, to put it bluntly. And that is NOT the problem, the problem is that if you're essentially going to re-use stuff to the point of copy pasting diplomacy with slight to none editing, there is no excuse I can think of for it to reroll to vanilla 5 state. There is no excuse to leave out important stuff that worked, such as INFORMATION. It's like they hate information. You can't access trade routes screen, unless there's a trade route to assign, no military and all units screen, no demographics, you can't even see what you just built?! That is INSANE. Are they deliberately trying to hide something? You can't hide the shortcomings by sweeping it under the carpet. How about tediousness that was in vanilla 5, but was tremendously improved upon by BNW? Oh, I remember sitting and waiting and waiting for stuff to get built in cities, by workers, and then the underwhelming effect of all that waiting. Why?

TL;DR: It's not BtS to vanilla 5 jump. Haven't they learned their lesson?

I think there is the feeling of "it will get better with polish". But there is a counter feeling of "haven't these guys learned their lesson by now?"

While BE does have new mechanics, most of its fundamentals are straight from Civ 5. As others have noted we are seeing some of the same mistakes that we saw in vanilla Civ 5...after the devs had years of polishing that game. Why were those lessons thrown out the window for this game?

Exactly.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Maybe but what numbers are you able to provide to support that claim ?

Over the last....gosh, that long?.... 40 years, I've worked for and with several game manufacturers. Starting with TSR (the makers of D&D and AD&D) in the Accounting office. Overall, manufacturers budget on the assumption that their Revenue will be roughly 40-50% of the retail price. The balance is the cut that is taken by the distributors and sales reps. Of the Revenue, at least 60% of it (@30% of the retail price) is spent on Operational Overhead: building leases, equipment, payroll, insurance, Advertising, shipping costs, printing, packaging, etc. The largest expense in that mix is the printing and packaging and distribution (shipping costs). [Unless a decision was made to go for MASSIVE Advertising.] Of the remainder (40% of Revenue/15-20% of the retail price) that is what actually pays for development, much of which is going out to royalties for authors and outside artwork. The distinction being between "in house" and "outside contractors". "In house" are salaried employees. However, it is quite common for authors to also work for the company, collecting salaries, but also collect royalties as authors. (That's what Gary Gygax was doing as the President of TSR and also the company's principle author.)

The company's bottomline Profit is usually less then 10% -- and on a hot title like Call of Duty or HALO that sell several million copies, that profit still yields the company several million dollars. And much of that gets paid out as dividends to the stockholders. (Which is why stock options is such a work incentive to company executives.)

Then along comes digital distribution. No more printing costs. No more packaging costs. No more physical (UPS, FedEx, trucking) distribution costs. Having to no longer pay out that portion of the overhead effectively triples the usual Profit margin. Or it would if it wasn't for the fact that consumers wouldn't let them pocket _all_ of the savings by maintaining the same retail price. That's why Steam and Green Man Gaming and Good Old Games and similar distributors regularly offer 20-30% discounts. [Stop and think about it: when was the last time you paid full price for a digitally downloaded game?] So instead of netting a bottomline of tripled Profits, the manufacturers are only getting between 1.5 and 2 times as much as they used to. As a bottomline, that's actually quite significant.

The increased Profits probably also explains why there has been a slow but steady rise in the production of video games. New game releases are starting to become nearly as frequent as new movie releases (on average about 3-5 per week). When I consider that ten years ago there was serious talk that video gaming was gradually "dying", I now note that it seems that digital distribution turned that trend around. Locally, retailers of video games became fewer and fewer, and the displays of PC games still available at the few retailers that remained shrunk from 2-3 aisles to less than just one-half of one side of an aisle display. But at the same time, the number and variety of PC games offered by Steam and similar distributors exploded. I now have considerably more choices for where to spend my gaming dollars.