Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread
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Leucarum
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It probably is but I don't want to spend money on DLC for it...
It was impossible to keep track of... But being fair, I don't think Civ7 is much better in that regard. I don't dislike the idea of civ switching in general, but I don't think either game solved the identity issues it introduces.
Civ7 also suffers for me in thay the number of civs which excite me drops really sharply between ages. In Antiquity I like everyone apart from Khmer and Rome. In exploration only Songhai, Shawnee and Hawai'i really motivate me to play, and in modern... Maybe Nepal is exciting but the conditions to make them fun are really specific. Civ7 really made me realise how much I gravitate towards ancient civs and don't really want to play the modern ones.
Selfishly, I really want an option to keep playing the same civ and not have to switch... I'm ok with civs not being fully powered in every era. It wasn't a problem which I think needed to be solved.
sonicmyst
Emperor
Sorry but I like civ switching now. Please do not generalize as "nobody likes civ switching."
A lot of people like it. Many of those that don't haven't actually tried playing the game.
user746383
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Civ switching seems okay, though it’s sort of hard to tell if I like it or not because they’ve connected it with “there’s a very shallow crisis and then the whole world simultaneously collapses off screen and then new civs move into the old ones cities after some time gap where things are moved around and buildings stop working oh and we forgot how to trade, but also the new civ chose your same immortal leader to lead them so you get to keep playing” mechanic which is less fun to me. In theory I like civs evolving over the eras.
For what it’s worth I’ve played the game.
For what it’s worth I’ve played the game.
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stealth_nsk
Deity
I don't think Firaxis set any expectations for number of simultaneous players of Steam at all. It's pretty meaningless metric by itself and since Civ7 is still primary SP game (until they finish some planned features) and has large focus on consoles, it's even more meaningless.
So if you don't have any information, no one has? Sure it's hard to navigate this thread and its predecessor as they are drowned in watching two simple metrics, but occasionally there are valuable points of information, for example:
- We had an approximate number of physical copies of the game for PS sold through Amazon in UK. Adjusting this by physical/digital ration, share of Amazon, share of UK and share of PS, this gives some number.
- We have estimation of total Civilization units sold in the recent years by April, which includes Civ7 and gives some upper limit.
- We have information about drop in total number of Civilization (all titles) players on Steam, meaning most of them moved to other platforms
- We have list of best-selling games in USA since the beginning of the year and some numbers on other games in the list
- We have some articles mentioning Civ7 position in top sale list for some particular countries, platforms and time periods
Individually none of this is proof enough, but if you ever worked with things like market analysis, it paints a pretty complete picture. By April Civ7 sold 2-2.5M units, with at least half being outside Steam.
You cant know if they moved to other platforms or stopped playing Civ completely.
stealth_nsk
Deity
As I wrote, you can try challenging each individual piece of information, none of them is precise enough. It's together they are convincing.
It would be safe to assume that a trend on one platform is the same on another. Bad reviews and bad retention rate is a trend that most likely spans all platforms. The sales are less interesting in a steamDB discussion. You'd have to get other official sources.
stealth_nsk
Deity
That's totally wrong assumption. As we've analyzed, the majority of Steam reviews (and nearly all negative reviews) were left by people comparing Civ7 with previous games. Since Civ5 and Civ6 were run mostly on Steam, we see this voice of old fans there, but it's not relevant to console audience, which is expected to have much more fresh faces.
user746383
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Hm, I've not seen even in market analysis where a convincing decision is made on anecdotal data - we pay a lot of money for the data to do our analyses on where I work. It's totally reasonable speculation, and I can see what you're getting at if all those things do end up being true, I just don't see the process of how you get to anything convincing by adding up more and more anecdata. As they say, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” Reality is we have very limited data, if you limit yourself to what we know for sure the numbers don't look great. But at the same time there's a lot of unknowns that could fall in the direction of things being good. I just don't think you can say they are convincing because you could imagine lots of them.
queenpea
Emperor
This doesn’t hold water for me. Why would Civ VI and V players on Steam suddenly pick up the game for console just because Civ VII was released on console?
This doesn't hold water. User ratings on PS5 and Xbox stores are very similar to the Steam user rating.
stealth_nsk
Deity
Some of people who previously played Civ5 and Civ6 on Steam, now bought Civ7 on consoles and play it there.
I didn't say they are significantly different, I just say you can't assume one based on the other.
If they are actually close, that's ok. Doesn't disprove my point.
GeneralZift
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I don't know why whether or not the player stats are bad is really a contention point.
There's no point in overcomplicating it by saying that each of the players is, in fact, secretly playing for like an hour, then switching with another, just to inflate the count.
Or for example, suggesting that there is a secret horde of thousands of Civ7 console players that are not accounted for.
Fyi, the console players probably only make about equivalent numbers to PC by my guesstimation, if at all (likely to be less than).
The reality is, these factors, while they might be true to an extent, doesn't really affect the bigger picture.
The big picture is that the count is dwindling overall, due to various factors that they need to address.
It's up to the developers to figure out amongst all the noise which factors are the critical problems, and the fixable problems, and to work quickly.
And it's up to us, the playerbase, to communicate our general grievances with the game, if any.
It helps too, to debunk the idea that the player stats don't matter however. Just because it's predominantly a SP game doesn't mean the count doesn't matter.
It's not a play-once story game like GTA or God of War, it's a (replayable) strategy game.
The way they've structured this game, is essentially reminiscent of live-service. It needs constant updates and DLC to become complete.
But if no one plays the game, then who is going to buy the DLC, pay for the updates and the team?
However, to play devil's advocate, let's be frank. They will be fine. Why? Because it doesn't cost that much to run, and DLCs are very profitable, so even with a small playerbase it will be self-sufficient.
There's no point in overcomplicating it by saying that each of the players is, in fact, secretly playing for like an hour, then switching with another, just to inflate the count.
Or for example, suggesting that there is a secret horde of thousands of Civ7 console players that are not accounted for.
Fyi, the console players probably only make about equivalent numbers to PC by my guesstimation, if at all (likely to be less than).
The reality is, these factors, while they might be true to an extent, doesn't really affect the bigger picture.
The big picture is that the count is dwindling overall, due to various factors that they need to address.
It's up to the developers to figure out amongst all the noise which factors are the critical problems, and the fixable problems, and to work quickly.
And it's up to us, the playerbase, to communicate our general grievances with the game, if any.
It helps too, to debunk the idea that the player stats don't matter however. Just because it's predominantly a SP game doesn't mean the count doesn't matter.
It's not a play-once story game like GTA or God of War, it's a (replayable) strategy game.
The way they've structured this game, is essentially reminiscent of live-service. It needs constant updates and DLC to become complete.
But if no one plays the game, then who is going to buy the DLC, pay for the updates and the team?
However, to play devil's advocate, let's be frank. They will be fine. Why? Because it doesn't cost that much to run, and DLCs are very profitable, so even with a small playerbase it will be self-sufficient.
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queenpea
Emperor
I just don’t think we’ve seen positive data to suggest the pc to console exodus theory.
stealth_nsk
Deity
Well, we have many Civ old-timers here on this forum, who bought Civ7 on console and play there.
On the other hand, I haven't seen a single person yet, who refused to play any civ games due to Civ7 release.
So, while it's not quantitative data, it looks convincing enough to say migration to consoles looks like more common reason.
queenpea
Emperor
No question that some players may have picked up a console version — whether that’s due to owning an outdated pc or just wanting to try out the console version — but to suggest that the considerable drop in players across civ titles is due to a large scale exodus from pc to console is unsupported.
Yeah, I mean they still have at least 1m+ sales of the base game, probably a number of which bought the Founders pack. It's probably not the cash cow the studio might have hoped for, but it's enough that they won't pack up and fold things overnight due to lack of support.
Or, they just got tired of Civ. After spending so many hours in Civ 7, they had had enough and went to play other games.
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