Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Verified_Confection_Being]

So yesterday the player stats weren't really affected by the patch release - numbers still sat around 8.5k peak midweek. I wonder if they'll pick up towards the weekend.

 

[protocol7]

My sense is the world has largely moved on to other things at least for now and it will take a large, amazing DLC to get people's attention again. I just never see civ mentioned or discussed anywhere (even to complain about it) except places like here and the civ subreddit, and the civ subreddit actually has fewer upvotes and comments on threads than before the game released. The most popular civ streamers have stopped streaming and those that still do have relatively lower view counts. What we're getting on the patch roadmap is nice for those of us still here, but isn't going to get /r/gaming (for example) talking about civ again. Successful games like Expedition 33 are selling a million copies a month, month after month (they're 3 months and 3 million now) and sucking all the air out of the room for games trying to make a comeback with a general audience. Stellaris has a new patch that has performance issues, but still has a higher trough than the peak for civ7. At this moment, on the _entire planet_, there's about 4k or so people playing civ7 on Steam, an order of magnitude fewer than live in my teeny tiny town.

The question Firaxis needs to figure out the answer to is why would someone play a 48% positive (and declining, 37% recently) game when there's so many nice, highly reviewed options of great games for gamers to play out there? I think there is an answer, but not sure exactly what it is or how to find it, and I hope they are successful.

 

[stealth_nsk]

So yesterday the player stats weren't really affected by the patch release - numbers still sat around 8.5k peak midweek. I wonder if they'll pick up towards the weekend.

Patches don't change much. Let's wait for the summer sale.

 

[protocol7]

I hope they don't "fix" the problem of low players by making it cheaper to match what it's actually worth, but instead make the game better and worth what those of us who bought it early paid for it.

 

[UWHabs]

The urban tiles would look a lot better if they didn't appear as mostly different shades on grey. I agree on the rural tiles, the forrests and grassland especially looked much better in 6.

Yeah, they need something to break up the urban tiles, and give you a little more view into things. Even stuff like maybe a single building on a tile it's a dirt road, and with 2 buildings you have nicer paved roads. Give me roof colors for the types of buildings on the tile. Have some tiles be stone roads, some brick roads, some paved.

At least for me, I find I don't need yields turned on to play, so that helps a little without them completely hiding the tiles. But I still for the life of me can't tell the difference between the biomes - whenever I see the wonder that gives me a bonus on tundra, I have to hover over every tile manually to see what's what.

 

[Krikkit1]

Yeah, they need something to break up the urban tiles, and give you a little more view into things. Even stuff like maybe a single building on a tile it's a dirt road, and with 2 buildings you have nicer paved roads. Give me roof colors for the types of buildings on the tile. Have some tiles be stone roads, some brick roads, some paved.

At least for me, I find I don't need yields turned on to play, so that helps a little without them completely hiding the tiles. But I still for the life of me can't tell the difference between the biomes - whenever I see the wonder that gives me a bonus on tundra, I have to hover over every tile manually to see what's what.

Having strong roof colors would definitely help (particularly when more zoomed out)…have them faded if they are obsolete.

 

[queenpea]

I hope they don't "fix" the problem of low players by making it cheaper to match what it's actually worth, but instead make the game better and worth what those of us who bought it early paid for it.

I think this will happen eventually with continued patches and base game updates. But this is a long term solution, and in the meantime there will be sales.

 

[queenpea]

Yeah, they need something to break up the urban tiles, and give you a little more view into things. Even stuff like maybe a single building on a tile it's a dirt road, and with 2 buildings you have nicer paved roads. Give me roof colors for the types of buildings on the tile. Have some tiles be stone roads, some brick roads, some paved.

At least for me, I find I don't need yields turned on to play, so that helps a little without them completely hiding the tiles. But I still for the life of me can't tell the difference between the biomes - whenever I see the wonder that gives me a bonus on tundra, I have to hover over every tile manually to see what's what.

I’ve become a total urban district nihilist regarding the need to visually differentiate between buildings. There is just really no strategic need to know which buildings are where. What I think will help urban sprawl is to increase building density by tile to three or four.

There are just too many buildings and too few tiles currently.

 

[UWHabs]

I’ve become a total urban district nihilist regarding the need to visually differentiate between buildings. There is just really no strategic need to know which buildings are where. What I think will help urban sprawl is to increase building density by tile to three or four.

There are just too many buildings and too few tiles currently.

I agree in that I think we could use a little more density. Personally I'd go for 2 buildings per tile in antiquity, 3 per tile in exploration, and 4 in modern. That way you're also not necessarily immediately overbuilding, you might have some obsolete buildings that stick around. Would need changes to what defines a quarter.

Otherwise, the visual distinction IMO is not as much about the buildings themselves, but just to break up the tiles a little. You could even add little things to the tiles where on quarters, part of the tile if taken up by a little city park, or a fountain.

 

[Dale]

Yeah, I'm familiar with this, it's totally possible to create cross-platform mod wrapper. But Civ5 offered capabilities to add native code to the game through opening DLL and native code can't be made cross-platform. Moreover, as far as I'm aware, consoles prohibit using native code mods as any native code needs to be reviewed by the company which owns the console. That's the reason why we have minor Civ patches, which break cross-platform compatibility, BTW - if they change any functional parts, each such patch requires review.

Civ5 was released 15 years ago (started Dev cycle 20 years ago). .Net and especially Mono have come a long long way since then. There are now games that have limited support for code mods, such as Fallout 4, Skyrim, and others. Yes it's true there are limitations, but those are more due to hardware limitations and security considerations, than an evil Sony or Microsoft in the background going tsk tsk. Imagine trying to install the Skyrim real environment mod on PS? It'd explode.

The technology, knowhow, precedent and permission from Console manufacturers is there. If Firaxis doesn't take it up, that's really on them.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Civ5 was released 15 years ago (started Dev cycle 20 years ago). .Net and especially Mono have come a long long way since then. There are now games that have limited support for code mods, such as Fallout 4, Skyrim, and others. Yes it's true there are limitations, but those are more due to hardware limitations and security considerations, than an evil Sony or Microsoft in the background going tsk tsk. Imagine trying to install the Skyrim real environment mod on PS? It'd explode.

The technology, knowhow, precedent and permission from Console manufacturers is there. If Firaxis doesn't take it up, that's really on them.

Using scripting languages was and still is possible. Civ5 originally had Lua scripting available right at release and Civ7 has JS/TS. You could use bytecode from .NET or Java, it's not much different in performance now.

But, whatever is used for scripting, the core engine and performance-critical parts are written in platform-specific C++ (or similar highly-efficient compiled language) and mods can't access this logic without deep and native integration. That's why Civ5 opened dll. That's why Skyrim and Fallout 4 have native SKSE and F4SE.

And I totally agree that the limitations are either due to hardware or console policy, that's exactly what I wrote. But they are still limitations.

 

[Krikkit1]

I agree in that I think we could use a little more density. Personally I'd go for 2 buildings per tile in antiquity, 3 per tile in exploration, and 4 in modern. That way you're also not necessarily immediately overbuilding, you might have some obsolete buildings that stick around. Would need changes to what defines a quarter.

Otherwise, the visual distinction IMO is not as much about the buildings themselves, but just to break up the tiles a little. You could even add little things to the tiles where on quarters, part of the tile if taken up by a little city park, or a fountain.

I think that makes it harder to see and plan... 2 already makes it slightly harder.
A better option might be to allow removing/overbuilding Warehouses in Cities. (because there are really only 6 normal Quarters worth of city buildings in an age... the others are warehouses which build up about 2+1.5+1, uniques +1 or +0 per age and wonders and other "Specials" RR, Aero, Launch pad)

If you could overbuild old Warehouses, then it would probably get them to 6-9 Quarters...maybe 10 by Modern in a developed city, which is only 1/3 the area of the city.

 

[MutilationWave]

I agree in that I think we could use a little more density. Personally I'd go for 2 buildings per tile in antiquity, 3 per tile in exploration, and 4 in modern. That way you're also not necessarily immediately overbuilding, you might have some obsolete buildings that stick around. Would need changes to what defines a quarter.

Otherwise, the visual distinction IMO is not as much about the buildings themselves, but just to break up the tiles a little. You could even add little things to the tiles where on quarters, part of the tile if taken up by a little city park, or a fountain.

I like the idea of having more buildings per quarter, but if it increases by age as you suggest, we would need an ability to destroy buildings. Maybe even revert them to rural. Otherwise the happiness penalties will be too great, as you wouldn't need to overbuild as many buildings.

 

[MutilationWave]

The discussion has moved on but maybe one of you smart people could help me understand something. I haven't done any coding since qbasic and I was not good at it.

So in reference to the getting extra benefits each age bug, Elizabeth's gold, Terracotta Army, etc. Why is the following not an easy solution.

If age != Antiquity then do not apply bonus gold, create new great general etc etc

I'm sure it can't be that simple, but it feels that way. Anyone want to help out a layman?

 

[Chiyo]

I just saw a German interview with a business consultant specialized in gaming. He estimates that the PC share for CIV7 would be under 20% which would surprise me very much. He thinks that for the initial sales the strategy was thus a success although the game estranged a huge part of its core gamership. Still the aim was to win more casual gamers and at least in the initial sale that seems to have worked. Whether it works in the long run remains to be seen as the sales pre-release were very good but not as good afterwards.
I presonally would be surprised if really so many people played Civ on consoles but I am a strategy nerd who does not play any console games except for the Nintendo classic franchises so what do I know.

 

[AD1730]

I just saw a German interview with a business consultant specialized in gaming. He estimates that the PC share for CIV7 would be under 20% which would surprise me very much. He thinks that for the initial sales the strategy was thus a success although the game estranged a huge part of its core gamership. Still the aim was to win more casual gamers and at least in the initial sale that seems to have worked. Whether it works in the long run remains to be seen as the sales pre-release were very good but not as good afterwards.
I presonally would be surprised if really so many people played Civ on consoles but I am a strategy nerd who does not play any console games except for the Nintendo classic franchises so what do I know.

Yeah, I find the 20% PC player stat extremely hard to believe. Guy is probably just going off stats for most games and using that to come up with this figure.

Again, if sales were strong on these other platforms, they would have highlighted it on the earnings call. They didn't do that though.

 

[Dale]

Using scripting languages was and still is possible. Civ5 originally had Lua scripting available right at release and Civ7 has JS/TS. You could use bytecode from .NET or Java, it's not much different in performance now.

But, whatever is used for scripting, the core engine and performance-critical parts are written in platform-specific C++ (or similar highly-efficient compiled language) and mods can't access this logic without deep and native integration. That's why Civ5 opened dll. That's why Skyrim and Fallout 4 have native SKSE and F4SE.

And I totally agree that the limitations are either due to hardware or console policy, that's exactly what I wrote. But they are still limitations.

You keep saying civ5. Not sure why. No one would program in the fashion of 20 years ago. Civ6 and civ7 are on a completely new engine than civ5. Civ5 engine is called LORE and is primarily a rendering engine (Low Overhead Rendering Engine). Civ6/7 engine is still C++, but is written in a way to support cross-platform.

Unless you said it somewhere else that I am not across, you didn't mention console hardware anywhere. I saw you say the console company needs to review code mods. Which may have been the case years ago, but current gen consoles they are not as strict as the consoles are now built with better support for modding. Not perfect, but better. There's no specific requirement for code mods to be reviewed by console makers anymore if the game has structures and supports built in place to ensure hardware and security are not compromised.

Moreover, as far as I'm aware, consoles prohibit using native code mods as any native code needs to be reviewed by the company which owns the console.

It's impossible to implement cross-platform modding tools if they are as deep as in Civ5 (DLL). Binary code is incompatible and native libraries use different formats.
If cross-platform modding tools will come out, they'll have roughly the same modding capabilities as current mods, just with some fancy wrapper.

You say it's impossible to implement cross-platform modding tools. It's not. Like I said, the technology, knowhow, precedent and permission from Console manufacturers is there. If Firaxis doesn't take it up, that's really on them.

Anyways, nothing left to say here.

 

[Askia Muhammad]

Patches don't change much. Let's wait for the summer sale.

That’s just untrue. The prior patches saw bumps on daily players.

I think people have just moved on or the fact they dropped this patch as a surprise - many probably don’t know there even was a patch. I promise you if my old MP group didn’t post in our discord I never would have known.

 

[AD1730]

That’s just untrue. The prior patches saw bumps on daily players.

I think people have just moved on or the fact they dropped this patch as a surprise - many probably don’t know there even was a patch. I promise you if my old MP group didn’t post in our discord I never would have known.

One practice I think Firaxis should adopt from Paradox is naming updates to their game. It's much more interesting and marketable to have an update named "Le Guin" than it is to have one named 1.1.6.

 

[Siptah]

Yeah, I find the 20% PC player stat extremely hard to believe. Guy is probably just going off stats for most games and using that to come up with this figure.

Again, if sales were strong on these other platforms, they would have highlighted it on the earnings call. They didn't do that though.

If Steam was 20%, the game would have sold 5m copies. The report stated that only 3m were sold across the franchise. Hence, it‘s officially far from the truth.