Sorry, I thought you were answering the question about "who".
But sure, optics it is then. If folks just want to give sincere advice to a CEO about how he should conduct interview pieces, I'll leave y'all to it. He might not see this thread, though.
Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread
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But sure, optics it is then. If folks just want to give sincere advice to a CEO about how he should conduct interview pieces, I'll leave y'all to it. He might not see this thread, though.
Gori the Grey
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Not giving him advice that I think he'll hear. Just saying what he should do.
Marla_Singer
United in diversity
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer."
Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo (2002-2015)
There's been extensive debates on that topic with Boeing. This reflects the Jack Welch school of management, which held that a company’s main purpose was to maximize shareholder value through cost-cutting and stock-based incentives for executives. In this view, the actual business is secondary as the same management methods could apply to any industry.
Over time though, such short-term mindset has revealed its risks. Jack Welch's legacy contributed to GE's eventual decline. Dave Calhoun, former Boeing CEO, was blamed for rushing production at the expense of quality. Such kind of leadership is increasinly criticized as "bean counting", focusing excessively on short-term stock gains at the expense of long-term resilience.
Traditionally, aerospace CEOs were engineers, which makes sense as it's difficult to run such a business without knowing what it takes to manage a development project or ramp up production. A similar pattern can be seen in the digital industry, where many leading CEOs started with at least some programming experience. A company isn't just a profit-making machine, it's a business that needs vision to be moved forward in the long term.
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I don't think it's a huge deal if the CEO of Take-Two doesn't play games because Take-Two is not a game developer (or hasn't been for over two decades anyway), they're a publisher and a holding company for various publishers. If the CEO of Firaxis said he doesn't play games I'd consider that a bad sign, but if the CEO of Take-Two does it doesn't really concern me. If an author told me he doesn't read any books I'd be pretty skeptical of any books he's written, but if the CEO of Penguin Random House tells me he's not a reader it's not going to effect my opinion of any of the many books published under it.
EDIT: That being said, in principle it's a bad look in any industry to try to distance yourself from the products you sell. I don't think, realistically, it's much of a practical concern for consumers in this case, but I also can't imagine many other industries where executives would feel confortable being casually dismissive of the things they're selling like this.
EDIT: That being said, in principle it's a bad look in any industry to try to distance yourself from the products you sell. I don't think, realistically, it's much of a practical concern for consumers in this case, but I also can't imagine many other industries where executives would feel confortable being casually dismissive of the things they're selling like this.
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Skojardu
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McDonnel Douglass (a company managed by executives obsessed with quarterly revenue) merged with Boeing (the company of engineers, who thought 'it we build it, consumers will come'), and, sadly, the McDonnel Douglass execs took over. Womp womp
Yeah, once you have a larger, over-reaching corporation, you're a lot more divorced from the individual product. I mean, I'll agree that it makes it a little weird to brag about not being a gamer, you'd think at worst you want to just avoid the question.
But I do think there is a difference once you get to these corporations that are multiple levels deep. The CEO sure probably needs to know what civ is, but remember that civ itself is even more distant. Take 2 owns 2k, of which Firaxis is one of the game studios underneath it. And even among that, civ is only one of the games under development there.
Trav'ling Canuck
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I thought this may be of interest to people following this thread. This is from Paradox, not Firaxis, but it's the most detailed explanation I've seen of how Steam reviews - specifically Steam reviews trending negatively - are interpreted by a dev team.
Askia Muhammad
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This is interesting - the initial collection of steam reviews is not to dissimilar to the AI generated report a user here reported - it’s just more in depth
Let's just hope it's also more correct.The AI generated report had quite some misunderstandings and hallucinations in its summary. As a base for a company trying to figure out what needs to be changed, it wasn't usable imho (even if maybe 80% were correct, it's hard to tell whether it includes non-obvious errors as well).
user746383
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Every day for the last month, despite the efforts of Firaxis and their apparent focus on improving things, there has been a worsening trend of more negative recommendations on steam each day than positive ones (it's about to tick under 49%, but it doesn't decrease much each day because there's also just very few total reviews which is sort of a separate topic). Why do you think that might be? Are they focusing on the wrong improvements? I guess it isn't just "gaming culture" because I can find other games on steam that get more positive reviews than negative, and all these reviews are from people who ponied up cash to buy the game rather than random internet drive-by haters. If what they've delivered and promised so far isn't helping, what do you think they'd need to focus on instead? Or maybe the recent changes aren't really meant to make more give positive reviews, for some reason, and they have some other goal?
I guess I would have thought after a few patches they would have started to turn some negative reviews into positive ones, instead of just generating more negative ones. But seems not? If you look at the first months of Civ5 and Civ6 they both had way more positive reviews than negative ones every day so I can't really make a comparison of when it might be expected to turn around, as they never had to turn anything around. Even though those launches stumbled and had groups that didn't like them, they never had more people not recommending the game than recommending.
I guess I would have thought after a few patches they would have started to turn some negative reviews into positive ones, instead of just generating more negative ones. But seems not? If you look at the first months of Civ5 and Civ6 they both had way more positive reviews than negative ones every day so I can't really make a comparison of when it might be expected to turn around, as they never had to turn anything around. Even though those launches stumbled and had groups that didn't like them, they never had more people not recommending the game than recommending.
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stealth_nsk
Deity
Yes, the key quotes are:
Note, that it's not about absolute numbers, it's about trend.
And below, it's shown how it's useful. Paradox uses Steam reviews as a source of qualitative, not quantitative information (other than trend mentioned above).
That's pretty good example of working with data.
Well, that’s what happens when you have fundamental design flaws and your approach seems to be fixing everything but that. It’s the same problem that Bethesda has with Starfield. The gameplay loop (among other things) is fundamentally flawed. Bethesda, adding a rover does not change the fact that exploration is tedious and boring in a game that’s supposed to be about exploration, it just makes me experience the tedium at a slightly faster rate.
For Civ 7, the UI issues took center stage early on since those hit people within a few minutes of getting into a game. Now, as some of those issues are fixed (or people navigate around them with mods) people see the core game design flaws. People start to get frustrated when you won’t acknowledge and fix the main problems with the game.
GeneralZift
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The problem with design is that it is one of the few things in a game that is hard or impossible to change once the game has released.
They can change the graphics, UI, balance, music, and add more content, but as soon as they tamper with lots of the core design, it essentially becomes a new game.
I'd point to Multiversus. They released a beta, and then they released the full version with entirely different gameplay design (the characters were more floaty, slower etc.)
The change in fundamental design (among other poor decisions) killed the player base. It's a totally different game.
For Civ7, what we have is what we have. They have a habit of changing the design a fair amount with Expansions in the past, but I cannot see a world where they change the design for Civ7 so significantly as to fix the major problems some people have with it.
It'd be an entirely new game altogether.
Yeah, if you don't like the game because of the whole switching civs/age reset, there are limits to what can be done there. I mean, sure, they could change the balance of what carries over, they can get more civs so more of the transitions are "natural", or maybe in the extreme be able to add in the ability to have a more neutral civ to "hang on" to your current civ. They can tweak the crisis balance, change legacy requirements, etc... But fundamentally, the game will be split into multiple acts, and if that's a problem you have in the game, it's not going to go away, because it's pretty core to the concept.
Now, I think me, and a number of other people, don't fundamentally have problems with many of those features and options, so those of us like that are basically just waiting for them to get through all the UI cleanup that we need, and then it's a matter of balancing out, and I think it will be fine. Overhaul a couple of the systems that are annoying right now, and combined with I'm sure some new tweaks and features, and I'm still excited for the long-term potential of the game.
But definitely at launch, and up through the first few games, the only way to get past the biggest flaws is with a lot of mods, and that's not good. Hopefully in time they will render most or all of them obsolete.
queenpea
Emperor
I would just throw the doors open for modders to see what they can make of it and what connects better with the public / players.
As someone who played CIV 1 - 6 for thousands of hours, I never thought there would come a time when I wouldn't preorder the next CIV. But the descriptions of this game just didn't do it for me. I decided to wait for early reviews after launch. And after reading those reviews, I decided I would wait, maybe until after several expansions, to consider buying.
Instead I have been playing Old World and have really enjoyed it.
Instead I have been playing Old World and have really enjoyed it.
My response would be to look at Stellaris’ lifecycle, where the changes it has undergone could have been done over multiple sequels.
I think there is a discussion to be had about when it becomes another completely different game. Is it ethical to change a game that much after release? Is it fair to expect people to roll back to previous updates to play the version they liked? I’m not sure what the best route is.
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