Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

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Ages and civ switching are literally the things they led with when they revealed the game, I remember it well because I had an extremely negative reaction to it. It's extremely difficult to argue that those aren't core systems to the game.
It might be the cynic in me, but i think one of the reasons for ages/civ switching and detaching leaders from civs was that it makes it easier to sell leader packs etc in DLC.
 
Based on the number of reviews, i dont think the DLC sold particularly well?
I would buy a remastered civ 4 in a heartbeat, but it was released in 2005- i am not sure how much demand there would be.
It gets down to the main discussion point of this thread, we don't know how successful Civ7 will be in the long run (as the majority of sales will come with discounts and we also have no reliable info on console sales). DLC sales are totally dependent on total number of units sold.

(since it's a discussion point, not everybody agree, of course, some people think Civ7 is already a disaster)

It might be the cynic in me, but i think one of the reasons for ages/civ switching and detaching leaders from civs was that it makes it easier to sell leader packs etc in DLC.
I don't see how they are easier. DLCs packs we have so far have both civs and leaders. Actually there are so many other reasons for age/civ switching and detaching leaders, that there's no need in having one more.
 
Probably increases pressure to turn around the game and make more money if they can’t rely on GTA6 revenue this year. It’s less easy to distract from a AAA game with 5-10k concurrent players if the AAA game with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players doesn’t show up.

They are a bit between a rock and a hard place there as they already tried low effort high cost with the base game and dlc for civ7, and given the structural issues they are having/general feeling of unfinishedness/fan pushback on things like not making models for unique units, it doesn’t seem to have been a big success so far. But, maybe they will be under pressure to do more of the same even though they also sort of need to show they can put in the effort to improve quality on the things they’ve already charged for.. which doesn’t directly bring in more near-term revenue. I don’t envy them the situation they’ve put themselves in.
 
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Maybe the GTA6 delay is why Civ7 was rushed out? The delay messed up financial projections?

Otherwise, I don't understand why Civ7 couldn't have also be delayed to polish the product....
It might have already been delayed. Alternatively Firaxis learned from Civ7 and isn't risking another rushed release, or they felt that additional time wouldn't help given the rumors that the UI was getting scrapped and restarted multiple times.
 
Maybe the GTA6 delay is why Civ7 was rushed out? The delay (or risk of delay, at the time) messed up financial projections?

Otherwise, I don't understand why Civ7 couldn't have also be delayed to polish the product....
Take Two projected $1.48-1.58b for fiscal Q4 2025. They have not many other major releases in this quartile, so the revenue of civ VII may be important to reach that (and the goal for the whole year). They haven't disclosed (yet) how much they projected for the launch of civ VII though. GTA might be a big enough carrot to tell people that expectations for 2026 aren't specifically high, but 2027 will be a great year.
 
Interestingly, Civ7 subreddit has 1.7k members, Civ6 subreddit 24k and Civ5 79k members.

Presumably this can be attributed to the general extinction of message boards but 1.7k is still quite a low number. This makes me wonder more about the state of the franchise than the game. The average Redditor is 23 years old.
Maybe that's a Reddit problem and less a civ problem. A lot of people abandoned reddit during the API drama in 2023. Since then moderators of reddit has also behaved like little tyranical kings of their shrinking echo chambers. I don't use reddit anymore.
 
Low effort seems a little harsh! High cost is unambiguously true though.
Maybe something like “as little as they think they can get away with” effort is more fair. Probably there was still a good amount of effort, but it seems clear they have a priority to keep it as little as they thought people would tolerate. Even then they did less than people tolerated.
 
Sure, but thankfully some studios and artists still seem to show some love and passion for what they are doing too, and haven’t embraced capitalism in that way. Somehow they even ship well-reviewed games and make a lot of money doing it.
 
Sure, but thankfully some studios and artists still seem to show some love and passion for what they are doing too, and haven’t embraced capitalism in that way. Somehow they even make a lot of money doing it.
Indeed. But seeing Ed and some of the others talk about civ 7 early on didn't suggest a lack of passion to me.
 
No, it’s more what they delivered so far than how they talked about it for sure.
 
Probably increases pressure to turn around the game and make more money if they can’t rely on GTA6 revenue this year. It’s less easy to distract from a AAA game with 5-10k concurrent players if the AAA game with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players doesn’t show up.
I can't see anything good coming out of this. Financially, Take-2 seems to be unstable, and GTA 6's delay could mean they have to "reorganize," which means cutting costs.
 
Maybe that's a Reddit problem and less a civ problem. A lot of people abandoned reddit during the API drama in 2023. Since then moderators of reddit has also behaved like little tyranical kings of their shrinking echo chambers. I don't use reddit anymore.

Join us on Lemmy! I have the same name on there. Population is low and niche communities lacking. For instance there is nothing for civ 7 on there. But it feels like old old reddit and moderation is very lax and chill.

Also all the civ 7 discussion on Reddit is on the main r/civ sub.

Edit to add- Lemmy is all free open source software. It is decentralized and part of the Fediverse. Great discussion on current events, politics, etc, generally from a Leftist perspective. Currently 53k active users across over 600 servers. The server you choose basically only matters because of thr other servers it is federated with (all by default) and moderation style. For example some instances (servers) don't allow discussion of piracy. They do not collect or sell your info, and there is no algorithm used to influence what you see. Really feels like the old internet, and like civ, you have a more mature, older skewed user base to chat with. Childishness is generally shunned by the users instead of heavy handed moderation.
 
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Most of the top posts in the civ subreddit have single digit upvotes and replies at the moment, with a few in the double digits and a much smaller percentage with three. Compare other AAA games that released around the same time as civ7 (or even older like BG3) and they have mostly triple to quadruple digit upvotes and double digit replies. Civ7 doesn’t really seem to ever get mentioned on the main gaming subs either. If there’s a large thriving civ7 community somewhere, it doesn’t seem to be Reddit, even if you count the main civ sub as a dedicated civ7 one (which it isn’t, there’s posts about older iterations mixed in).

EDIT: out of curiosity I checked the Steam forum for civ7 to see if it was popular there, since I never use that. It looks to have about the same level of discussion as Reddit, but is overwhelmingly negative and as far as I can see it’s very nearly entirely posts complaining about the game on the home page at least right now.

Seems like maybe CFC is the most active civ community out there? Which is pretty cool. I’m not a huge fan of Reddit either.
 
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To be honest, I was very excited for Civ7 up until they revealed the mechanics in detail, then I was wary, and then as more info came out, I became more wary, then as it released in a sorry state, it has cut my excitement for sure. So now that the game is out, the reviews are bad, and people are unlikely to want to invest - I use myself as an example.
For the people who bit the bullet and bought it anyway or preordered, they're most likely going to be the most upset in the forums. Even the people who liked the new mechanics in concept still didn't enjoy the game due to the lack of polish. I would presume only a small minority is happy 'as-is'.

We'll see how this experiment pans out as the years go by, but this isn't the first time I've seen things go south on new releases, especially in this genre (AoE4 for example).

The best thing they could do after Civ7 would be a 'Civ Ultimate' - I think people would probably really enjoy a 'Greatest Hits' of Civilisation mechanics, that's something that would build consumer confidence and have people willing to invest. Especially after a game that has sort of dampened consumer confidence.
However, the sceptic in me thinks that while this game would be a hit financially in the short-term, it will suck for long-term success because - how on earth do you follow it up? (Similar situation to Smash Ultimate for example.)
 
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