Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[tman2000]

I played Civ 1 as a kid, without a spreadsheet.

This weird insistence that games have, or cater to, to follow a person as they age, seems to come with forgetting that most, if not all of us, started when we were younger. Significantly so in a bunch of cases. Something becoming more accessible on a certain axis doesn't mean it has to be void of depth on other axes. That is a claim, and claims need evidencing (to be taken seriously).

This sounds eerily like the "Star Wars isn't for you anymore" corporate marketing argument.

 

[bladex1200]

This sounds eerily like the "Star Wars isn't for you anymore" corporate marketing argument.

To be clear there isn't anything wrong with saying that as long as you also don't expect those people to continue to be customers. If you want to pivot your brand and you are looking for a new customer base because the existing one is better-served by other products competing with you, there is no issue with that. It's lost love, sure, but you gotta learn to move on.

Only issue is you cannot bite the hand and expect it to continue feeding you, a video game production company isn't my family dog.

 

[tman2000]

Only issue is you cannot bite the hand and expect it to continue feeding you, a video game production company isn't my family dog.

If I had to apply, "the purpose of a system is what it actually does," rule, I'd say that these business strategies are designed to sabotage the market sector in general, which is a way to suppress entrepreneurial disruption even without creating profitability. As long as new brands can't rise up and grab market share and displace old studios/companies/platforms and leverage this market power to disrupt financial markets, then it doesn't matter if there are no customers.

It really seems like the intent is to maintain the pretense of continuing to generate value in these market sectors, just to suppress market disruption by new entrants. Demoralizing the consumer base would also serve to suppress market entry. Force people to either grow up and stop playing games, or get younger generations to habituate to alternatives like Roblox (a platform for infinite meaningless experiences fueled by social media and monetizable at minimum development costs for huge margins).

There's no evidence that these "new audiences" will generate half the value established audiences will. It's not like corporate executives and consultants don't have access to demographics data.

EDIT: If I was a mustache-twirling villain who wanted to kill off the games industry, I'd hire behavioral psychology experts to consult on how to make game investment systems as addictive yet unfun as possible, and then pair it will a gaslighting narrative in marketing to manage narratives and deflect from the true. Systematically make games suck while claiming there's a need to reach new audiences. Systematically. Variety without substance would be one of the principles I imagine a behavioral scientist would recommend. "Get the green one, buy the blue one, earn the red one, now there's a yellow one you can obtain by playing MOAR."

 

[Gorbles]

I mean, from a company perspective, if a game won't follow the audience as it ages then it needs to capture a larger-and-larger youth audience as its existing audience ages-out. You can't just expect shareholders to be okay with franchise profits shrinking - they want year-over-year growth. So preserving your existing audience is in the company's best interest as you grow a new audience.

I understand and agree with your logic (I don't like it, but that's a political derail ).

I simply think that the widening of the appeal hasn't come at the cost of anything that I liked in previous games. The assumption that it has to is what I'm challenging.

If anything, the game is too obtuse at times with a bunch of mechanics. The mechanical depth is both concealed, and at times trivialised. 1.2.5 goes way to improving that, imo.

Easy to play, hard to master. That's always been what this kind of game should be. Not a spreadsheet simulating high-barrier-to-entry kind of thing.

A game lacking complexity to cater to say a switch console is well just what it is .

Mechanical complexity is separate to enforced performance limits through things like player counts and map sizes.

If you want to make a claim, evidence it. Otherwise it means nothing.

This sounds eerily like the "Star Wars isn't for you anymore" corporate marketing argument.

Nah, it's more "just because they're still also aiming for kids to enjoy the game, that this isn't some kind of dumbing down".

Trying to restrict the focus of the game so that it no longer appeals to kids, or claiming that it's somehow worse off for doing so, is the same as "Star Wars isn't for you anymore". Only at a different target. Hopefully you don't agree just because thr target is different

 

[itix]

I think this is right, but there's some maximum limit to this reach. Civ (well, anything recognizable as Civ to most of us) is never going to get many "casual" gamers. It's not a casual game! You play it over hundreds of turns, where you attend to thousands of individual micro-decisions, all ideally gradually aggregating to a victory. So it involves focused and sustained attention. Moreover, it's history based, and huge swathes of the population regard interest in history as geeky.

I think this is a (super-complex) marketing-and-design balance to try to strike. I once asked it this way: if you appealed only to hard-core strategists (the ones who love 4, say), how large a customer base could you reasonably hope to reach? That would set your sales. And that in turn would set your development budget. With that size budget could you make such a game?

Which reminds me of the fact that Firaxis is still the largest studio developing a single strategy game. It is possible because they can, or at least could, reach large audience.

Then there is the other extreme: Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2, with 10k sales on Steam (85% positive rating).

 

[aelf]

If I had to apply, "the purpose of a system is what it actually does," rule, I'd say that these business strategies are designed to sabotage the market sector in general, which is a way to suppress entrepreneurial disruption even without creating profitability. As long as new brands can't rise up and grab market share and displace old studios/companies/platforms and leverage this market power to disrupt financial markets, then it doesn't matter if there are no customers.

It really seems like the intent is to maintain the pretense of continuing to generate value in these market sectors, just to suppress market disruption by new entrants. Demoralizing the consumer base would also serve to suppress market entry. Force people to either grow up and stop playing games, or get younger generations to habituate to alternatives like Roblox (a platform for infinite meaningless experiences fueled by social media and monetizable at minimum development costs for huge margins).

There's no evidence that these "new audiences" will generate half the value established audiences will. It's not like corporate executives and consultants don't have access to demographics data.

EDIT: If I was a mustache-twirling villain who wanted to kill off the games industry, I'd hire behavioral psychology experts to consult on how to make game investment systems as addictive yet unfun as possible, and then pair it will a gaslighting narrative in marketing to manage narratives and deflect from the true. Systematically make games suck while claiming there's a need to reach new audiences. Systematically. Variety without substance would be one of the principles I imagine a behavioral scientist would recommend. "Get the green one, buy the blue one, earn the red one, now there's a yellow one you can obtain by playing MOAR."

wut? Is this a conspiracy theory?

 

[Bug Repellent]

I think there's another explanation at play here. A lot of current devs are young and thus are not part of the generation that created the franchise. Nonetheless, willing or not, they will imprint their cultural and societal views on new releases. So you get games that to us older folks definitely feel woke, because to us, well, they are. For example, I find Firaxis's insistence on a 50-50 gender split artificial and thus limiting, giving that for most of human history male leaders far outnumber female leaders. But the new devs see virtue in doing so, and I'm fine with that. But I still find it utterly silly that the base game shipped with Tubman but not Genghis. Sid's original Civ game would have never done this. Is it wrong to have Tubman? Absolutely not, but from a marketing perspective for old folks like me the game is less appealing. But is is likely MORE appealing to younger audiences. So what do I know... I'm just the old dinosaur that gets to keep its money playing the same great old games from yesteryear. I look at Civ7 and still go "Yup, not my cup of tea. Back to HOMM3".

 

[MutilationWave]

wut? Is this a conspiracy theory?

Maybe a stretch of it in that comment, but I was confronted with the idea of "the purpose of a system is what it does" about a year ago. I resisted the idea at first, but it seems to hold true. No matter what a system is meant for, its ultimate function is what it does, and in this case I think they're onto something economically.

 

[bladex1200]

Maybe a stretch of it in that comment, but I was confronted with the idea of "the purpose of a system is what it does" about a year ago. I resisted the idea at first, but it seems to hold true. No matter what a system is meant for, its ultimate function is what it does, and in this case I think they're onto something economically.

I think aelf's criticism is less with the axiom and more with how it is being applied:

If I had to apply, "the purpose of a system is what it actually does," rule, I'd say that these business strategies are designed to sabotage the market sector in general, which is a way to suppress entrepreneurial disruption even without creating profitability. As long as new brands can't rise up and grab market share and displace old studios/companies/platforms and leverage this market power to disrupt financial markets, then it doesn't matter if there are no customers.

It really seems like the intent is to maintain the pretense of continuing to generate value in these market sectors, just to suppress market disruption by new entrants. Demoralizing the consumer base would also serve to suppress market entry. Force people to either grow up and stop playing games, or get younger generations to habituate to alternatives like Roblox (a platform for infinite meaningless experiences fueled by social media and monetizable at minimum development costs for huge margins).

There's no evidence that these "new audiences" will generate half the value established audiences will. It's not like corporate executives and consultants don't have access to demographics data.

And I tend to agree with aelf's skepticism, if only because "suppress entrepreneurial disruption" doesn't make sense specifically with the context of "stop playing games".

If the goal was to get people to pivot to mobile-friendly experiences with more transactions per customer (allowing maximum customer milkage since people who weren't customers before can be customers now for the lowest possible price), then I would agree with "the purpose of the system is what it actually does" applying here. I just don't think Civ is necessarily at that stage yet.

Civ 7 released to consoles, it didn't release to cell phones. Its model still relies on larger DLC packages - selling Civs piecemeal is still way too high a barrier of entry compared to selling direct buffs or crafting materials or gambling drops the way a game like Diablo IV does - a game which IMO is emblematic of how you can take non-mobile franchises and pivot them to a profit approach that resembles mobile game markets.

I think it's much more likely that Firaxis and 2K are simply attempting to maximize profit value in this sector without a reasonable approach for how to expand within it.

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

well we are 237 pages deep and I dont know if the argument has already been made or not but is success not defined by how much money civ7 made at this stage ( before 1st expansion ) in its lifetime. but it seems we are discussing success by active player count on just PC and steam . we have no idea how much money went into development and how much profit firaxis made by the higher pricing compared to previous titles of the franchise or even other games of the same genre. i remember as an example people passionately hating d3 at launch and yet d3 was hailed as the biggest commercial success of the franchise . fans and stockholders disagreeing is nothing new .

 

[Gorbles]

I think there's another explanation at play here. A lot of current devs are young and thus are not part of the generation that created the franchise. Nonetheless, willing or not, they will imprint their cultural and societal views on new releases. So you get games that to us older folks definitely feel woke, because to us, well, they are. For example, I find Firaxis's insistence on a 50-50 gender split artificial and thus limiting, giving that for most of human history male leaders far outnumber female leaders. But the new devs see virtue in doing so, and I'm fine with that. But I still find it utterly silly that the base game shipped with Tubman but not Genghis. Sid's original Civ game would have never done this. Is it wrong to have Tubman? Absolutely not, but from a marketing perspective for old folks like me the game is less appealing. But is is likely MORE appealing to younger audiences. So what do I know... I'm just the old dinosaur that gets to keep its money playing the same great old games from yesteryear. I look at Civ7 and still go "Yup, not my cup of tea. Back to HOMM3".

Suddenly Ed Beach and the rest of the older developers that need to step down aren't the problem?

I don't think being old or young is really relevant there.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I played Civ 1 as a kid, without a spreadsheet.

This weird insistence that games have, or cater to, to follow a person as they age, seems to come with forgetting that most, if not all of us, started when we were younger. Significantly so in a bunch of cases. Something becoming more accessible on a certain axis doesn't mean it has to be void of depth on other axes. That is a claim, and claims need evidencing (to be taken seriously).

I think this is right, but there's some maximum limit to this reach. Civ (well, anything recognizable as Civ to most of us) is never going to get many "casual" gamers. It's not a casual game! You play it over hundreds of turns, where you attend to thousands of individual micro-decisions, all ideally gradually aggregating to a victory. So it involves focused and sustained attention. Moreover, it's history based, and huge swathes of the population regard interest in history as geeky.

I think this is a (super-complex) marketing-and-design balance to try to strike. I once asked it this way: if you appealed only to hard-core strategists (the ones who love 4, say), how large a customer base could you reasonably hope to reach? That would set your sales. And that in turn would set your development budget. With that size budget could you make such a game?

I would say mechanically Civ games have gotten more, not less complex. This doesn’t mean they are better games, just that there is far more detail, hell clutter to the systems

 

[A_Most_Foolish_Fool]

I think there's another explanation at play here. A lot of current devs are young and thus are not part of the generation that created the franchise. Nonetheless, willing or not, they will imprint their cultural and societal views on new releases. So you get games that to us older folks definitely feel woke, because to us, well, they are. For example, I find Firaxis's insistence on a 50-50 gender split artificial and thus limiting, giving that for most of human history male leaders far outnumber female leaders. But the new devs see virtue in doing so, and I'm fine with that. But I still find it utterly silly that the base game shipped with Tubman but not Genghis. Sid's original Civ game would have never done this. Is it wrong to have Tubman? Absolutely not, but from a marketing perspective for old folks like me the game is less appealing. But is is likely MORE appealing to younger audiences. So what do I know... I'm just the old dinosaur that gets to keep its money playing the same great old games from yesteryear. I look at Civ7 and still go "Yup, not my cup of tea. Back to HOMM3".

So, there is a lot wrong here that needs to be addressed. To start with there is no 50-50 gender split in Civ 7. Looking at the leaders available on release (ignoring personas), Civ VII has 7 women as leaders out of 21 leaders (that is nowhere close to 50%). Looking at Civ VI, there are 5 women as leaders out of 19 leaders. So, to sum it up comments like this have been raging for months on end about two women being added to the game. There were exactly the same amount of male leaders as in Civ VI. I am sick of pretending that comments like yours are not in bad faith, because they are. Saying that Sid's original games would never have a 50-50 split is complete fiction as well considering Civ 2.

Looking at your next point, the last time Genghis Khan was in the base game was in Civ IV. The last time Shaka was in the base game was in Civ 3. The Civ franchise has for decades focused on bringing a lot of new leaders into its roster for the base game and then has added old favorites in as dlc or added content down the line. Harriet Tubman is a great addition to the game (and has a really cool set of abilities that very few leader options could bring to the table) and she is also not the reason why Genghis Khan was pushed to DLC. Not sure why she is being brought up here at all.

 

[tman2000]

wut? Is this a conspiracy theory?

No, it's "This explains the outcome of developing Civ 7 better than assuming they wanted to maintain a strong audience." It's tongue in cheek and also, is it?

 

[tman2000]

The goal was to get people to pivot to mobile-friendly experiences with more transactions per customer (allowing maximum customer milkage since people who weren't customers before can be customers now for the lowest possible price), then I would agree with "the purpose of the system is what it actually does" applying here. I just don't think Civ is necessarily at that stage yet.

Just to continue with the thought experiment, the idea is that modern capitalism (since 1945) has had to maintain monopolistic and semi-monopolistic barriers in order to protect the financial system (creative destruction, price wars, highly leveraged fragile interconnected debt networks). Video games are big money. They're really cheap in terms of capital costs.

Capital costs as a barrier to entry is a huge part of how monopolization works within a paradigm of financialization. If anyone can just bring a team together and make a civ-like that is as successful as the one owned by 2k, then slot into which the games sector fits in the financialized economy isn't protected from disruption.

So, a complete surgical dismantling of consumer demand - "scatter it to the winds" - would be the only way to protect this sector of the economy.

Of course the joke is that Civ 7 is so bad and its development so inexplicable (see: Starfield, Kerbal Space Program 2, etc. etc.) that a convoluted industrial conspiracy to make games repugnantly unfun so we don't even want to play them anymore almost makes more sense than just botched development.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I think this is right, but there's some maximum limit to this reach. Civ (well, anything recognizable as Civ to most of us) is never going to get many "casual" gamers. It's not a casual game! You play it over hundreds of turns, where you attend to thousands of individual micro-decisions, all ideally gradually aggregating to a victory. So it involves focused and sustained attention. Moreover, it's history based, and huge swathes of the population regard interest in history as geeky.

I think this is a (super-complex) marketing-and-design balance to try to strike. I once asked it this way: if you appealed only to hard-core strategists (the ones who love 4, say), how large a customer base could you reasonably hope to reach? That would set your sales. And that in turn would set your development budget. With that size budget could you make such a game?

I would say Civilization series has always been casual, at least on middle ground difficulty levels. It's an Arcade series. If it weren't for its need of save states, it would have been in bars. Funny thing is that now, some Arcade games got saves with cards, but Arcade is dead. Plus obviously considering the length of games, there would need to have some pay-to-win mechanics. (because 1 credit for an entire game is not profitable) The Arcade machines would be squatted by a handful of nerds and nobody else could play it. I said pay-to-win, but it would rather be pay-to-not-lose, or potentially-lose-quickly. (Ages, but way shorter for example) But I'm done with this funny comparison, thing is that Civ7 is just continuing the streamlined aspect of the franchise, except this time it's really too simple as a first glance, AND too complicated behind this. Everything floats in thin air. So you have the choice : either you "play the game" and try to figure out the hidden mechanics, by coming here or elsewhere, or you play it on feeling. I have no clue of how efficient this last is in higher difficulty levels (only played level 1), but it's not immediately pleasant. For example how satisfying it must be to have high yields everywhere, but I only had crappy yields everywhere. No doubt, the core players here have no trouble getting those and understand far well the mechanics. Firaxis roadmap to explain things better is not for you. I even doubt it's for anyone really. When i saw what they are trying to do, I thought : why don't they change the clunky way it works instead of partially explaining it a tiny little bit more ? Because I don't have the feeling it will do much.

Pushing workers to improve a tile production X3 versus mysterious adjacency bonuses...

Where are you, adjacency bonuses,
Oh, oh, where are you,
How can I get you,
massive adjacency bonuses ?

 

[Angst]

Of course the joke is that Civ 7 is so bad and its development so inexplicable (see: Starfield, Kerbal Space Program 2, etc. etc.) that a convoluted industrial conspiracy to make games repugnantly unfun so we don't even want to play them anymore almost makes more sense than just botched development.

take a step back and have a think. so it's bad on purpose to alienate players.

the line of logic here is that the game has the purpose of alienation; to alienate, it has to be played; and to be played, it has to sell. this includes getting kids to play competitor games, which is also a sell.

so i'm just gonna say: if firaxis knew how to deliberately get people to buy poor product - or even use poor product to get people to buy other things deliberately - capitalism has been solved, and they'll take over the world. you thought viral marketing was efficient? go home, advertisement, you're no longer an industry. firaxis understands consumer behavior so well they can deliberately make a bad product and get the consumers to buy it and play it and decide it's not their thing - and even have them purchase some live service from a competitor.

i believe you, of course. i've already sent in the job application (you gotta get your foot in early); firaxis' time is coming soon, and i want to be secretary of ufos.

Maybe a stretch of it in that comment, but I was confronted with the idea of "the purpose of a system is what it does" about a year ago. I resisted the idea at first, but it seems to hold true. No matter what a system is meant for, its ultimate function is what it does, and in this case I think they're onto something economically.

yes, but don't mistake "purpose" as "intent".

systems often have their own structured functions independently of active intent. the purpose of the sentence is fundamentally to detach deontological judgment from structural analysis, and to focus on what systems do, and specifically that they often function above individual input.

really far sidenote on this (because i think it's interesting); Cube is a pretty charming cult horror flick from 1997. it's basically proto-Saw. a bunch of people wake up in a science fiction cube structure with a number of rooms, fileld with deadly traps, and they try to get out - and to figure out the nature of this thing, why they're even there. spoiler for the ending

Spoiler cube :

you never learn why the structure was built in the movie; the intent is irrelevant to its purpose. i believe some sequels were made, but they take away from this. people ask regularly throughout the movie why the cube was built - what the purpose of it is - but the point of the movie is that the intent for it is irrelevant, while its purpose is clear. the purpose of the cube is what it does, not why it was made

for thread relevance, Cube does tell a world where some society, whoever architected the cube, definitely have immense conspiratorial power. firaxis, for whatever prestige they have, don't amount to the conspiratorial mega-function that is implied through the thought-experiment - that they somehow upended all of advertisement and have total control of all human psychology. because whatever the purpose of firaxis as a system, what they do is the problem in the supposition; in that they do not control our minds.

 

[Gori the Grey]

a convoluted industrial conspiracy to make games repugnantly unfun so we don't even want to play them anymore almost makes more sense than just botched development.

really, it's either that or the mushroom theory

 

[marius_kaparius]

Civ 7 seems to be up in Wishlist activity. #8. There is a lot of demand to still convert if updates continue in the right direction.

 

[GeneralZift]

I appreciate the developers with the attempt to simplify the game for newcomers (make it easier to understand that is!) but keep it mechanically interesting for longevity and for veteran players.

Unfortunately it had the opposite impact. Newcomers actually struggle more understanding Civ7, as do veterans, from the quantity of bonuses, unnecessary complexity of mechanics and poor UI (all debatable how you like).

And on the other side they actually made it less interesting, because they created a pigeon hole effect with the legacy and ages systems - because you have a number of certain objectives you have to play towards, with a number of certain ways to play towards them, with bonuses specifically tailored for them.

Let's compare it with the alternative. If you had open-ended bonuses and no specific objectives, then you could carve your own way to Victory every time and play an essentially different game every time.
You could play an economic game without being a colonist, or you could be a colonialist with an economic / religious focus like Spanish.
There is no treasure fleet to draw your focus, and the bonuses aren't so specific as to pigeonhole you.

This is also partly why I recommend that they start shifting bonuses away from the Civilizations and Leaders at startup and towards Government choices, Wonders, special effects, city states and other circumstances.

This way you can worry less about Civilization and Leader balance and more about general game balance. The player can worry less about their strategy at the start of the game and more about their strategy as it unfolds in real time.

Civilization is really a fun series but I feel developers should step back and take a look at the bigger picture, sorting the issues there, and then with good games come more players.