Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[TylertheDestroyer]

You don't need a lot of sales to get into the top 100. We literally calculated in the other thread that for the position in got to relative to maneater, it represented about 3,000 DLC sales in a week. Thats a spike in sales from their baseline sure, but it's still loss making. Their staff levels require about $40mil a year. So they need a little under $1mil sales a week on average after the cuts of sales houses and publishers.

The sales from the steam chart were about 1/4mil to 1/3mil. That's not a good sign unfortunately.

It's funny that people haven't realized that being in top 100 isn't an achievement for such a large AAA product, it's just expected of them. Dragon Age: Veilgaurd topped steam charts at #2 during it's launch/release, that still didn't change that the game severly underpreformed commercially.

 

[Civinator]

In the German Drogeriemarkt Müller Civ 7 for PS 5 now is reduced to € 29,99.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I've been messing around with chatgpt some more. We know first month sales were about 1mil on steam, and about 1.8mil total according to:

Civilization VII’s March Update Brings Fresh Content, VR Announcements, More - 9meters

Fans of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII have plenty to celebrate this March. Firaxis Games is continuing its strong post-launch support with Update 1.1.0,

9meters.com

Feels about right given the 3mil cap we have from total Civ franchise unit sales in the last year that 1.8mil came from first month Civ VII sales.

Subsequently, steamdbs upper estimate has sales on steam track up from 1mil to about 1.25mil from march to July. Assuming a similar steam to other platform ratio of approx 1:1 as per first month sales-ish, that gives us an additional 500k sales, taking us to about 2.3mil total.

2k and firaxis need about 5-6mil sales to break even as it stands. That would require this game to have a stronger tail than Civ VI. Given current player retention and review scoring, I think that could be difficult.

I think the full pivot away from Civ switching is inevitable to see whether classic mode can draw back more players, as at the moment they are staring at the probability of a lifecycle cash loss.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

If true, it shows that corporate execs rarely fail to come to the wrong conclusions. What they should conclude is that Firaxis needs housecleaning and a change in direction.

I know 2k is the lightning rod for community anger, but I think we should look at Ed Beach who is squarely behind the design of Civ 7. He visited London and wanted to design a game around a civ in layers. Ages, hard resets, civ switching, leaders not matching historical civs, leaders that are not actual leaders but writers and scientists, all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

 

[Kwami]

all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

*part of the player base

A lot of us actually like those decisions and the game.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

If you compare Civ 6 vs Civ 7 credits, it seems that they ballooned the development budget for the latter. Civ 6 had a total of 800 people while Civ 7 had a massive 2600 people working on it.

The exact same situation happened with Skyrim vs. Starfield. Skyrim had a modest workforce which was ballooned with Starfield.

Skyrim, much beloved and critically acclaimed. The most popular of the player base in the series.

Then the production was absolutely bloated up for the highly anticipated next game, which ended up falling flat and destroying the studio's once-vaunted reputation

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

*part of the player base

Sorry, majority of player base. I should recognize the minority of players that do enjoy the game. I didn't mean to imply that "every" player didn't like it.

 

[ombak]

They may already be working on it. Like, what would the dev team do after the game is released? Work on expansion, for example.

If the developer has other projects and they still do things this way, a portion of a team like this could move to the other internal projects while normal expansion work is being done, until they need to ramp up again.

 

[Maiq]

I know 2k is the lightning rod for community anger, but I think we should look at Ed Beach who is squarely behind the design of Civ 7. He visited London and wanted to design a game around a civ in layers. Ages, hard resets, civ switching, leaders not matching historical civs, leaders that are not actual leaders but writers and scientists, all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

Yeah, it's cool he got the game he wanted, now he owes the people that allowed him to do that, the game they want.