Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Gorbles]

but the fact that many Civilization fans never bought the game or if did hardly played it, & don't want anything to do with it.

There are concrete statistics to back up this fact, presumably?

 

[youngsteve]

There are concrete statistics to back up this fact, presumably?

I should think the fact the amount of people playing the game is so low should give you an idea, If what I said didn't have some truth in it, where are they, as number would be way above Civ 6, let alone the ancient Civ 5.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

You are confusing matters again, like many people do on here, deflecting from what is really happenning. I am not talking about player reviews, which you are right are still negative, but the fact that many Civilization fans never bought the game or if did hardly played it, & don't want anything to do with it. Firaxis/Take 2 have spoken in the past about widening the appeal of the game & gaining a new audience on top of their exisiting player base, which nearly all developers do at one time or other. There is no doubt they have been succesful inpart, with a big part of the audience people who haven't played the franchise before. The consequence of the changes though have pushed most of the exisitng playerbase away from the game, though not the franchise it seems. So despite the new audience the overall playerbase has fallen considerably because of this.

The fact is the game had record pre-orders for a Civilization game. Can you provide some data on what percentage of Civ fans didn't buy the game? Can you provide some data on what percentage of Civ fans that bought the game hardly played it, and don't want anything to do with it?

 

[Gorbles]

I should think the fact the amount of people playing the game is so low should give you an idea, If what I said didn't have some truth in it, where are they, as number would be way above Civ 6, let alone the ancient Civ 5.

I wasn't asking for player numbers. I know the player numbers. I'm asking for you to source your "fact" that a lot of fans didn't even buy the game.

Because it's kinda coming across as wishful thinking from someone who doesn't want the game to be popular. Or count as a "real" Civ game (even though it is, factually). Valid opinion, I disagree with it personally of course. But not a fact.

 

[nakzox]

It had a lower high point because:

It is less affordable than V or VI, but, it still had record pre-orders which clearly isn't shown in the Steam player count, which leads me to believe other platform pre-orders were fairly sizeable.

I always took the "record pre-orders" claim to mean in terms of dollars rather than actual units sold. Which makes sense considering prices were raised and there was a $100+ version. Basically, because corporate needs to make it sound better than it actually is. I have nothing to back this up though, and will admit I'm wrong if it comes out elsewhere.

At the same time, I think people really overestimate the number of players on consoles in terms of how many sales there could have been on those platforms. Again, I have nothing to back this up, but rather just a hunch I have.

 

[nakzox]

People are talking about maybe the game surpasses Civ VI's player count in a few years, rather I think it would be lucky to surpass V's.

 

[zerokarma]

I think a lot of people are reluctantly playing it hoping it gets better, you can see evidence of that when the new patches come out but disappointment is still there and then it starts to decline again. At best the 7 player base is stable but not growing, I wouldn't count on it surpassing anything at this point, I'd be more worried it go the beyond earth road.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think a lot of people are reluctantly playing it hoping it gets better, you can see evidence of that when the new patches come out but disappointment is still there and then it starts to decline again. At best the 7 player base is stable but not growing, I wouldn't count on it surpassing anything at this point, I'd be more worried it go the beyond earth road.

This thread never stops surprising me. "Reluctantly playing" is just the next level.

 

[aelf]

There are concrete statistics to back up this fact, presumably?

Playing fast and loose with words seems to be the pattern here. People have been saying things like "most fans" or "most people", even when the data they cited showed at best a slight majority. And any evidence that seems to favour their conclusions can be used willy-nilly regardless of whether it still makes sense when used to explain, say, civ-switching as opposed to the ages system.

The standard for proof is not very high. How popular an opinion is seems to matter more.

 

[Leucarum]

There are a lot of set opinions and not a lot of willingness to accept that the (not great) data we do have suggests the picture is murky. Which also leaves your interpretation of how bad it is up to your degree of pessimism.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Remember, by the way, that when you count Civ V numbers, to always add one, because I play offline.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

 

[ColtSeavers]

I wasn't asking for player numbers. I know the player numbers. I'm asking for you to source your "fact" that a lot of fans didn't even buy the game.

Seriously guys, low sales figures mean lot of fans have not bought the game. It's starting to get ridicolous here!

 

[GeneralZift]

Remember, by the way, that when you count Civ V numbers, to always add one, because I play offline.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Really I think we should forget all the statistics since we are missing Gori

 

[stealth_nsk]

Seriously guys, low sales figures mean lot of fans have not bought the game. It's starting to get ridicolous here!

We don't have sales figures either.

 

[Bug Repellent]

We do have sales estimates. The difference between Civ6 and Civ7 is so stark, these estimates are good enough to get a pretty good idea.

Per Gamalytic (hard-ish numbers, presumably), Civ6 vs Civ7 shown below. The big issue for me is Civ7's very low "Copies sold in the last 7 days" which currently sits at 0.25M annual rate. Even taking Civ6's lowest number of copies sold at 15.9m and Civ7's max copies sold at 1.5m, at the current rate of sales - mind you Civ7 was 30% off last week and post Patch 1.2.5 - Civ7 needs (15.9-1.5)/0.25 = 57.6 YEARS to catch up. And this is the best scenario. If you take the midpoint of "copies sold" for both, Civ7 needs 90 years to match Civ6 at its current rate of sales.

The other unfavorable comparison for Civ7 is concurrent players at the same point post release. Per SteamDB, ~ 250 days post release Civ6 was doing 20k players. Civ7 is doing 6.5k. A third.

The last unfavorable comparison. Right now, a Saturday morning in Civ7's largest market (North America), there are 27 Civ7 viewers on Twitch. Civ6 has 839. 31 TIMES as many. In my opinion Civ7's horrendous city sprawl make the game unstreamable and the numbers seem to back this up.

IMHO, Civ7 is doing very poorly. Can its fortunes be turned around? Perhaps, but Firaxis needs an exceptionally well received first expansion - and soon. Releasing $30 DLCs with a couple of leaders and a handful of civs will not do it. For me, unless they release a sandbox oriented ageless, no civ switching version that also fixed the awful city sprawl the game is a hard pass.

 

[stealth_nsk]

We do have sales estimates. The difference between Civ6 and Civ7 is so stark, these estimates are good enough to get a pretty good idea.

Per Gamalytic (hard-ish numbers, presumably), Civ6 vs Civ7 shown below. The big issue for me is Civ7's very low "Copies sold in the last 7 days" which currently sits at 0.25M annual rate. Even taking Civ6's lowest number of copies sold at 15.9m and Civ7's max copies sold at 1.5m, at the current rate of sales - mind you Civ7 was 30% off last week and post Patch 1.2.5 - Civ7 needs (15.9-1.5)/0.25 = 57.6 YEARS to catch up. And this is the best scenario. If you take the midpoint of "copies sold" for both, Civ7 needs 90 years to match Civ6 at its current rate of sales.

The problem is that those guesstimates use even less data than we can. Not only they only use public data, they use automated calculation, so they limit themselves to short list of universal data sources. Moreover, I could argue that they seriously underestimate Civ7 sales for several reasons (i.e. because of early access for those who bought Founder's edition).

With time, I could estimate sales number with much better precision, but who cares?

 

[Bug Repellent]

The problem is that those guesstimates use even less data than we can. Not only they only use public data, they use automated calculation, so they limit themselves to short list of universal data sources. Moreover, I could argue that they seriously underestimate Civ7 sales for several reasons (i.e. because of early access for those who bought Founder's edition).

With time, I could estimate sales number with much better precision, but who cares?

Anyone is free to look at the overall picture through rosy glasses or otherwise. To me, things that aren't guesstimates like concurrent player numbers and live Twitch numbers tell a sufficiently terrible story for Civ7. Civ7 can't fake fan engagement on Twitch. This much is undisputable.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Anyone is free to look at the overall picture through rosy glasses or otherwise. To me, things that aren't guesstimates like concurrent player numbers and live Twitch numbers tell a sufficiently terrible story for Civ7. Civ7 can't fake fan engagement on Twitch. This much is undisputable.

Anyone could look through any glasses. For example through professional ones.

Here's a description of methods used by Gamalytics: https://gamalytic.com/blog/how-to-accurately-estimate-steam-sales
While the aggregated precision is great, it requires all of the data points to be correct. For example, using concurrent player count requires estimating playtime, which is cool for research, but impossible to automate. And, for example, top seller rank doesn't allow estimating sales during period when game doesn't reach top rank, also it requires knowing sales structure in terms of base game/DLC, which is info not available at all.

EDIT: And, of course, this includes Steam only. Civ7 has bigger sales outside Steam than previous games. Based on the polls here and on Reddit, you need to multiply Steam numbers by 1.2 to get total numbers, but there were other data sources hinting at much higher number of console players.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

We do have sales estimates. The difference between Civ6 and Civ7 is so stark, these estimates are good enough to get a pretty good idea.

Per Gamalytic (hard-ish numbers, presumably), Civ6 vs Civ7 shown below. The big issue for me is Civ7's very low "Copies sold in the last 7 days" which currently sits at 0.25M annual rate. Even taking Civ6's lowest number of copies sold at 15.9m and Civ7's max copies sold at 1.5m, at the current rate of sales - mind you Civ7 was 30% off last week and post Patch 1.2.5 - Civ7 needs (15.9-1.5)/0.25 = 57.6 YEARS to catch up. And this is the best scenario. If you take the midpoint of "copies sold" for both, Civ7 needs 90 years to match Civ6 at its current rate of sales.

Isn't your method flawed? You're assuming Civ VII will not increase its annual rate, when it's clear that Civilization games sell more as years go by with bigger discounts, more updates & DLC. I believe the Steam reviews per year for VI shows this:

• 2016 - 22,765
• 2017 - 14,399
• 2018 - 16,103
• 2019 - 29,350
• 2020 - 59,383
• 2021 - 55,260
• 2022 - 50,807
• 2023 - 47,143
• 2024 - 44,015
• 2025 so far - 24,668

So that's 85% of all Civ VI reviews coming 2 years after its release. 77% coming 3 years after its release. Not to mention the fact that Civ VII is less affordable than VI was at the same point (higher initial price plus less sales & smaller discount), plus it launched on other platforms, VI did not. If anyone wanted to play VI within the first 3 years, they had to buy it on Steam and play it on a computer. Both of these factors will slow down VIIs sales and "annual rate".

The other unfavorable comparison for Civ7 is concurrent players at the same point post release. Per SteamDB, ~ 250 days post release Civ6 was doing 20k players. Civ7 is doing 6.5k. A third.

Where are these figures from and what do they represent? Average players? Peak concurrent players? Of a day you picked out? Or a week? Or a month?

 

[Gorbles]

Seriously guys, low sales figures mean lot of fans have not bought the game. It's starting to get ridicolous here!

Asking for statistics instead of vibes is pretty much the entire point of the thread. It's, effectively, the bare minimum one can do.

Trying to spin me politely asking for some as some kind of incredulous, ridiculous argument is getting tiring.