Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Gorbles]

Individuals do not have a direct perverse incentive to deliberatly inflate review scores the way game critics do

It’s not remotely comparable

Individuals have all sorts of perverse incentives. Politics can inspire a good few examples here. But, off-topic.

Individuals don't have the same incentives, and the standards a publication is (or should be) held to should be greater than any single individual. But they exist.

(though it's also not impossible for a user to be "bought" - this is why Steam factors both gifts and refunds into review status)

Ironically, discrediting any publication based on allegations that surround one, or even a handful, is also itself an off-topic tangent. So it's difficult to explore constructively in this subforum, which is why I'm happy simply making the point that "trust" is a subjective metric that applies to both critical and user reviews.

 

[aelf]

Which makes ditching the core identity of the game even dumber in retrospect, especially with the example of Fallout and Halo in front of you

The point is many among this group would've dropped off (at least at the start) even if there wasn't civ-switching.

Also, to beat the dead horse into the ground, hindsight and all that.

 

[stealth_nsk]

It might be worth repeating (since the discussion here seems to have its own version of the solar and lunar cycles) that my theory is Civ 6 managed to capture a majority of the 4x player population, and to the many who entered the series at that point, it cemented itself as what Civilization is. This group would probably find it even more difficult to stomach any changes than the population who had seen at least a few iterations of Civ.

Well, since Civ6 has the most owners, it clearly took more players than any other game. But I believe setting strict border of 4X games is not working well here. Most of the people are not stick to a particular genre. A lot of people who own Civ6 didn't have any 4X games before it and still enjoyed it.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

The core thing here is what to count as active player (if we consider drop in players, we need to define what we mean by this number). From commercial point of view Firaxis should be interested in metric, which shows players who are ready to buy DLC or expansions. I believe this should be something like "players who played at least once in the last 30 calendar days". And I think in this definition, number of active players is much higher than on launch.

So you believe there have been more unique active players who have played the game in the past 30 days than the first 30/in February? I find that it hard to believe. Wouldn't the peaks each day be much higher than what they are?

I don't have stats, but I'd guess most of the active players on launch had the game on daily, for like 2-3 hours, more on weekends. Let's say that's 20 hours per week (could be much more, but we're looking for average). But after some time, a lot of people dropped to much slower mode, probably not launching game for weeks and playing with large gaps, so this could be like 2 hours per week. Of course, those numbers are totally off the top of my head, but they are within possible, so 10x drop could be caused by reduced play time alone.

That makes sense with those numbers, I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are though. I think the average number of hours played per player each week is closer. It makes sense to me that the first 30 days would've had more unique players due to all the first time players. Let's say the game sold 750,000 in the first 30 days, that would be 750,000 unique players for certain. I don't think there has been more than 750,000 unique players in the past 30 days.

 

[stealth_nsk]

So you believe there have been more unique active players who have played the game in the past 30 days than the first 30/in February? I find that it hard to believe. Wouldn't the peaks each day be much higher than what they are?

As usual, I say we don't have enough information, but that's surely possible. The game has constant flow of sales, so probably we now have 2-3 times more game owners than initially. With a lot of players returning to try patch 1.3.0 and pirate DLC, that wouldn't surprise me at all. But as I said, it's impossible to measure with the data we have.

That makes sense with those numbers, I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are though. I think the average number of hours played per player each week is closer. It makes sense to me that the first 30 days would've had more unique players due to all the first time players. Let's say the game sold 750,000 in the first 30 days, that would be 750,000 unique players for certain. I don't think there has been more than 750,000 unique players in the past 30 days.

We have 7115 average players in the last 30 days (today's data from SteamDB). 30 days are 720 hours. Which means that if average playtime is 2 hours during this period, that's 2.5M players.

The problem is that we don't know whether the average is 2 hours, 20 hours, or 30 minutes. If we look at active players like people on this forum, they clearly play more, but usually there's a "long tail" of users who smash average to the ground.

 

[aelf]

Well, since Civ6 has the most owners, it clearly took more players than any other game. But I believe setting strict border of 4X games is not working well here. Most of the people are not stick to a particular genre. A lot of people who own Civ6 didn't have any 4X games before it and still enjoyed it.

I guess what I was trying to say is the population who would play a 4x game.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I guess what I was trying to say is the population who would play a 4x game.

I think this number is around several billions (teen+ world population, minus people with religious prohibitions, strong disabilities and those not having access to hardware). What else could make someone never ever play a 4X game?

EDIT: In marketing terms it's about TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Available Market) and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market). Civ6 grabbed majority of SOM, but it also created a pretty solid base to expand it further, ironically outside of Steam and Steam statistics. EGS free giveaway of full Civ6 game can't be considered as sales or serving the market, because those owners didn't pay anything. But among people who grabbed it were people who never played 4X games before, but thanks to this giveaway they could consider buying Civ7.