Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Leucarum]

I think it would be sad if you were right. I spent a lot of time playing Civ 6 but looking back I don’t actually think it’s a very good game. It certainly captured a lot of people’s imaginations, and is unquestionably the most popular game in the franchise’s history, but I think its approach of simply adding more stuff to the backbone of Civ 5 made it end up in a bloated and unsatisfying place at the end.

I think the Civ 7 development goals absolutely were the right thing for Firaxis to try to address. I absolutely would not have bought a version of Civ 4/5/6 with better graphics. It’s a shame they didn’t hit the mark, and it would be a greater shame if so much of the audience was put off that Civ 7’s future is cut short.

I don't know that I'd characterize 6 as being 5 with additional systems. Playing the map with districts was a big change, and the feel/pace of the game is very distinct. At least to me the two games play so differently that I enjoy one but struggle to find enjoyment in the other (5 is the only Civ game I've bounced off and walked away from, after playing 1-4 to death, then 6 and now 7).

The problem might also be that they bit off a few too many chunks. Just the ages, leader mixing/matching, or civ switching alone would have been a big change to the franchise. While their dev diary discusses how interconncected they view the changes as being - if each of those changes alienates a different set of potential players the negativity can snowball... Especially as they didn't stick the landing.

 

[CliffCo]

I still feel like it should have only been released on PC initially then added the other platforms in the months following so they could have concentrated on the bugs one platform at a time. While it would have upset some players on console i believe generally everyone would of had a better initial experience and the initial loss in sales would have balanced out in the long term.

 

[Gorbles]

I still feel like it should have only been released on PC initially then added the other platforms in the months following so they could have concentrated on the bugs one platform at a time. While it would have upset some players on console i believe generally everyone would of had a better initial experience and the initial loss in sales would have balanced out in the long term.

Bugs are an ongoing thing. Adding more platforms down the line doesn't stop previous platforms having issues.

On top of that, people specialise. You're unlikely to have the same people fixing bugs on multiple platforms unless the code is shared (which some of it will be).

 

[CliffCo]

Bugs are an ongoing thing. Adding more platforms down the line doesn't stop previous platforms having issues.

On top of that, people specialise. You're unlikely to have the same people fixing bugs on multiple platforms unless the code is shared (which some of it will be).

True but if they could have had more people specializing on a platform at release then some of the bugs on PC could have been fixed sooner and things would have gone a lot smoother with less negativity.

 

[MutilationWave]

I still feel like it should have only been released on PC initially then added the other platforms in the months following so they could have concentrated on the bugs one platform at a time. While it would have upset some players on console i believe generally everyone would of had a better initial experience and the initial loss in sales would have balanced out in the long term.

This is the way I feel it should have been done. I understand they want to expand to other platforms and grow player bases there, but 4x is ultimately a PC genre. I can't imagine playing without a mouse. I can't imagine playing without UI mods. They really bit off more than they could chew with the simultaneous release.

Between the consolification of the game and the AI, I think the AI is the bigger issue by far, but the first can't be ignored.

I think the emotional reactions people have had to civ switching and ages are in a different bucket. Those things barely bother me at all personally.

 

[Gorbles]

True but if they could have had more people specializing on a platform at release then some of the bugs on PC could have been fixed sooner and things would have gone a lot smoother with less negativity.

Hiring and resource allocation doesn't tend to work like that. In order to get a console release out in a few months, they will have already have to have had console engineers working on a version pre-release.

Also, a lot of reported stability issues were on console. The issues with UI, UX, game systems, and so on, are completely unrelated in terms of (team) resource.

 

[stealth_nsk]

According to this Civ7 is currently 8th in overall sales in the US across all platforms. This to me is a positive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1ks17pe/civ7_sales_rank_in_the_us

So, it generally confirms the picture of Civ7 having really strong sales outside Steam. While we don't have full numbers, all slices of data point to this.

The problem is context. 8th sounds good until you look at what's behind it, and see it's 2 sports games and then games which haven't even released in the period in question.

Only Oblivion remaster is new, all other games are represented in previous month too. Where Civ7 were doing great too, btw.

I don't think anyone doubts it sold well initially on the coatails of 6 though, the problem is it doesn't give any support to the idea that it's got legs to keep growing

It's not initial sales, two columns show sales for the last 2 months.

 

[queenpea]

So, it generally confirms the picture of Civ7 having really strong sales outside Steam. While we don't have full numbers, all slices of data point to this.
months.

What makes you say this?

 

[fantsu]

According to this Civ7 is currently 8th in overall sales in the US across all platforms. This to me is a positive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1ks17pe/civ7_sales_rank_in_the_us

US taste in games is just laughable. Wth?

 

[user746383]

That’s not representative of US taste in games, or even really US sales in general, those are self reported numbers from only members of their “digital leader panel”, which is possibly something they pay to be part of. This is some slice of the US market that the member groups use for PR rather than saying anything about sales outside the companies that contribute data to the report.

 

[CliffCo]

US taste in games is just laughable. Wth?

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. I’m enjoying it much more than Civ6.

 

[CliffCo]

That’s not representative of US taste in games, or even really US sales in general, those are self reported numbers from only members of their “digital leader panel”. This is some slice of the US market that the member groups use for PR rather than saying anything about sales outside the companies that contribute data to the report.

But hey if someone gets some comfort from believing it tells them things are going great, who am I to judge. Life is hard and you take what you can get.

Expedition 33 is an RPG/action game so not the same genre, and doesn’t have a niche player base like 4x games do.

 

[user746383]

Those games are all different genres as best I can tell, rather than a ranking of niche games. The unifying factor for being present is that their publishers are members of their panel and submitted numbers to the report, and nothing else.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

Only Oblivion remaster is new, all other games are represented in previous month too. Where Civ7 were doing great too, btw.


It's not initial sales, two columns show sales for the last 2 months.

The two columns represent where the games rank in terms of reporting period to date sales, not in terms of total sales for each of the 2 months. Civ has sold the seventh most units in the US since the 5 January last month, and it has sold the 8th most units since 5th January this month, because 1 month of Oblivion sales has outsold it's total sales since launch in February.

 

[user746383]

I wonder why if it’s really true that non-PC users are the vast majority of owners and active players that they would let game-breaking bugs languish on those platforms, and prioritise updates for PC players (Switch is even still running the patch before last). On Reddit, whenever ps5 comes up it’s still always people looking for solutions to constant crashes. Plenty of games make frequent patches to console these days, so that can’t be the reason.

If all my players were on consoles and there were just a few thousand playing on PC at any given time, I’d have chosen to punt on those tiny number of PC players at least temporarily if I was trying to be successful long term rather than leave console versions where all my actual players are with crash issues and out of date.

 

[Gorbles]

If all my players were on consoles and there were just a few thousand playing on PC at any given time, I’d have chosen to punt on those tiny number of PC players at least temporarily if I was trying to be successful long term rather than leave console versions where all my actual players are with crash issues and out of date.

Console verification (even these days) is a lot more of a process than it is for PC updates.

 

[itix]

I increasingly wonder if Firaxis have been working to solve a problem (keeping players engaged to the end game) which a lot of players really didn't want/need them to solve. The 3 act structure and civ switching do achieve their goals - so maybe its the goals which are the problem?

There is an interesting thread on Reddit.

"I play it as a sort of roleplaying fantasy game, and I love it. It's definitely sandbox-y, the win conditions are rarely my goal"

"The fact that I don't care for the winning screen. I play Civ to build up civilizations, and it's a lot of fun! But I usually set my own goals for what I want my society to become - there are tons of things you can go for!"

"One of my favorite things to do in Civ games is getting the “winning” out of the way and then spend a thousand years just playing world police."

That is not a representative snapshot of the Civ community, but it is interesting how some playstyles prefer open-ended games. For them, Civ 6 is the SimCity of the 4X genre.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1ksfgrz/has_civilization_series_ever_been_a_sandbox

 

[stealth_nsk]

What makes you say this?

There are several hints so far. We've seen report of very good sales in the UK for PS. Also, someone analyzed statistics on Steam and with release of Civ7 total number of players in all Civ games dropped on Steam significantly, supposing they moved to other platforms with Civ7 release.

None of this is hard proof, but each hint points in the same direction.

The two columns represent where the games rank in terms of reporting period to date sales, not in terms of total sales for each of the 2 months. Civ has sold the seventh most units in the US since the 5 January last month, and it has sold the 8th most units since 5th January this month, because 1 month of Oblivion sales has outsold it's total sales since launch in February.

Thanks, I misunderstood it. Yes, that's an example of bad metric choice and makes this chart pretty unusable directly for anything. But as indirect metric it still works (still better source to predict good/bad sales than number of simultaneous plays on Steam).

 

[sonicmyst]

Just throwing in some gamer statistics here. More gamers are casual gamers, male, and Asian.

How Many Gamers Are There? (New 2025 Statistics)

The latest data on global and US gamers, featuring stats on player numbers and regional differences.

explodingtopics.com

 

[trev1972]

It looks like the decline in player numbers is slowing - perhaps we have hit the floor.
Do you think civ will try an early sale to increase numbers?.

As for initial sales, i think the product sold well initially on both PC and console. I do think a lot of that is down to reputation. I dont know if retention has been better on console than PC, perhaps console players want different things out of the game to PC players. My gut instinct is that retention has been low overall which doesn't bode well for selling DLC