Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[itix]

A year ago, the Civ 6 player count peaked at 100k. Now it is below 50k...

 

[Atchulhu]

A year ago, the Civ 6 player count peaked at 100k. Now it is below 50k...

There was a huge discount on VI at last year's summer sale, so a lot of people bought it at the time and played it for a while. It's natural for the numbers to have declined since then, especially with VII on the horizon. The game had reached the end of its development cycle and was obviously not going to grow.

On top of that, I imagine a lot of players have put Civ aside altogether after VII's horrible release. I'm certainly one of them. After 2500ish hours in VI, I was ready for the next chapter. When that then turned out to be the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones' last season, I stopped playing Civ altogether. I have no desire to play VII, and its failure has also made me lose interest in VI since it's a dead end with no future besides continued existence in stasis.

It really can't be overstated how poorly VII has done. Its peak Steam users (which essentially translates into release numbers, since these games always peak at release) is half that of VI, but the Steam userbase tripled in the time between the release of VI and VII. For VII to have half the launch numbers as VI, when the platform has three times as many users as it did at VI's launch, is extremely bad. And while VII did release on multiple platforms, the console numbers are clearly insignificant--the game ranked 125th on PSN in its launch week. This has always been an overwhelmingly PC-centric series and it's clear that the proportion of players on non-PC platforms is miniscule, judging both by the actual figures and by the fact that console users are almost entirely absent in discussions, screenshots and other discourse about the game. In short, nearly all Civ players are on PC.

In fact, if we adjust the peak numbers of these two games by the growth of Steam as a platform, VII's popularity (relative to platform size) is 1/6th that of VI. We can call it 1/5th beacuse VII did launch on multiple platforms, although the non-PC ones are pretty insignificant. And lo and behold, the daily numbers on Steam happen to coincide with that: ~50k for VI, ~11k for VII. In short, if we use these metrics to judge how well VII has done, it's one fifth of the game that VI is/was.

 

[Askia Muhammad]

The other controversial aspect was the AI, which was hyper aggressive and yet so incompetent that you pretty much couldn't ever lose a game if you put in even minimal effort. And there just wasn't much to do. Civ V on release was boring.

They need to do something to make the AI hyper aggressive in 6 & 7. Half the time I can’t get them to declare war after the first 50 turns no matter how many times I anger them and cross their boundaries.

 

[Atchulhu]

They need to do something to make the AI hyper aggressive in 6 & 7. Half the time I can’t get them to declare war after the first 50 turns no matter how many times I anger them and cross their boundaries.

It's actually because the AI has become much better at assessing the vulnerability of others, and experienced players will naturally take steps to make themselves less vulnerable. Things like walls, encampments, unit placement and terrain choke-points can make the AI decide against attacking, and doing these things tends to become a habit to such an extent that we don't even realize we're actually playing out a highly effective anti-warfare strategy. While the AI in VI and VII is far from perfect, it does a decent job of assessing whether or not it could successfully attack you, and if it's clear that it couldn't, it probably won't. In older iterations, the calculation was closer to something like "my unit score > your unit score? then war!"

 

[Disgustipated]

In older iterations, the calculation was closer to something like "my unit score > your unit score? then war!"

This still seems to be the case for Civ 7. At least in my experience. And if I forget to build enough commanders, I get attacked at the beginning of an age.

 

[Voidwalkin]

I mean, there's definitely something to the concept of 'controlling the narrative.' I've watched enough elections and PR debacles to understand that image is important, and image often only has a loose connection to substance. Underlying this, of course, is the fact that people aren't completely (aren't mostly?) rational and herd mentality absolutely exists.

There may be some exposure bias here. You're communicating with people engaging in discussion about the game. Yeah, those are often gonna have entrenched positions.

I would bet the majority of gamers don't read Reddit or CFC, though.

 

[MutilationWave]

They do…but also don't. Basically, the player's seat in the game determines the order in which they get to choose their civ. They prioritize picking their preferences, but if the previous seats take out all the preferred choices, then the player in a later seat will pick the civ randomly from the remaining pool.

For example, Charlemagne (seat 2) and Napoleon (seat 8) overlap 100% in Modern: they both prefer only France and Prussia. If I as the player take Prussia, and Charlemagne takes France, then Napoleon's civ pick will run wild.

With how many Western leaders they've introduced in the base game while having a much smaller amount/ratio of Western civs, it's not surprising how the AI picks may seem completely random at times.

We desperately need more civs from the Americas and Africa.

 

[MutilationWave]

a dead end with no future besides continued existence in stasis.

Ba'ak in my day, all games existed in stasis.

Don't let the problems with 7 make you hate 6.

 

[Civinator]

A current positive review at steam:

 

[user746383]

Modern problems require modern solutions.

 

[stealth_nsk]

A current positive review at steam:

View attachment 735731

Yeah, I saw the other way around too. Like "the game is great, but I oppose greedy corporate policies, so here's a negative review".

As we already discussed, the way people give positive or negative reviews has pretty vague connection with actual game quality and is more about personal expectations. Still, of course, the current trend of mostly negative reviews probably affects buying decision for some people.

 

[user746383]

I just took a read through 30 or 40 reviews, none of them were "I liked the game but here's a bad review" or "I didn't like the game but here's a good review", so maybe those examples (while funny to share) don't really reflect how people use the review system at least in aggregate. If I look at games that I know people pretty universally love, I also don't find a mix where some of them are really poorly reviewed, some are highly reviewed, and some in the middle. It seems they are all in the "overwhelmingly positive" section.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I just took a read through 30 or 40 reviews, none of them were "I liked the game but here's a bad review" or "I didn't like the game but here's a good review", so maybe those examples (while funny to share) don't really reflect how people use the review system at least in aggregate. If I look at games that I know people pretty universally love, I also don't find a mix where some of them are really poorly reviewed, some are highly reviewed, and some in the middle. It seems they are all in the "overwhelmingly positive" section.

Yeah, it's not common. But concerns unrelated to the game itself are more or less frequent. I've just opened the store and one of the first 10 is like this:

(BTW, as discussed multiple times, Civ7 doesn't have anti-cheat, just DRM...)

 

[Xandinho]

We desperately need more civs from the Americas and Africa.

Indeed. In the next releases, I'd prefer if they prioritized filling the gaps that make transitions in the Americas and Africa feel chaotic, rather than adding more civilizations at random or from already well-covered regions, such as South and Southeast Asia.

For the Americas:
A proper successor to the Maya
A proper predecessor to the Inca
A proper successor to the Inca
A proper successor to the Shawnee

For Africa:
A proper successor to Aksum
A proper predecessor to Songhai
A proper successor to Songhai
A proper predecessor to Buganda

Once these gaps are filled, I’d like them to take a look at Oceania as well, since Hawaii feels completely out of place without appropriate transitions.

I believe much of the criticism around the civilization transition system stems from the fact that many of the links make absolutely no sense, which causes a massive break in immersion—such as the case of Maya > Inca.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Ba'ak in my day, all games existed in stasis.

Don't let the problems with 7 make you hate 6.

Yeah, it's not like Civ 5's launch stopped people from playing Civ 4, if it's their favorite iteration. I'm still having fun with Civ 6.

A proper successor to the Shawnee

This is the only one I'm not too sure about. Arguably they could have been at Modern to begin with, but I admit their playstyle fits the Exploration Age better. I'm not sure about any tribe they could logically progress into considering they still exist today. Some of them made it to Mexico, so for now I think Mexico and America would have to be it.

 

[aieeegrunt]

There was a huge discount on VI at last year's summer sale, so a lot of people bought it at the time and played it for a while. It's natural for the numbers to have declined since then, especially with VII on the horizon. The game had reached the end of its development cycle and was obviously not going to grow.

On top of that, I imagine a lot of players have put Civ aside altogether after VII's horrible release. I'm certainly one of them. After 2500ish hours in VI, I was ready for the next chapter. When that then turned out to be the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones' last season, I stopped playing Civ altogether. I have no desire to play VII, and its failure has also made me lose interest in VI since it's a dead end with no future besides continued existence in stasis.

It really can't be overstated how poorly VII has done. Its peak Steam users (which essentially translates into release numbers, since these games always peak at release) is half that of VI, but the Steam userbase tripled in the time between the release of VI and VII. For VII to have half the launch numbers as VI, when the platform has three times as many users as it did at VI's launch, is extremely bad. And while VII did release on multiple platforms, the console numbers are clearly insignificant--the game ranked 125th on PSN in its launch week. This has always been an overwhelmingly PC-centric series and it's clear that the proportion of players on non-PC platforms is miniscule, judging both by the actual figures and by the fact that console users are almost entirely absent in discussions, screenshots and other discourse about the game. In short, nearly all Civ players are on PC.

In fact, if we adjust the peak numbers of these two games by the growth of Steam as a platform, VII's popularity (relative to platform size) is 1/6th that of VI. We can call it 1/5th beacuse VII did launch on multiple platforms, although the non-PC ones are pretty insignificant. And lo and behold, the daily numbers on Steam happen to coincide with that: ~50k for VI, ~11k for VII. In short, if we use these metrics to judge how well VII has done, it's one fifth of the game that VI is/was.

This is looking more and more like a Fallout 76 debacle, for very similar reasons

 

[Captain Lime]

Until the day this game dies (my bet is ~2-3 years) I will question why Firaxis chose to add whatever civs and leaders they thought would be cool rather than those that are best geared towards introducing the Eras system. Picking cool civs may have worked in previous games, but Firaxis knew that this era system would be controversial, so why not try and make that first impression as good as possible? They should have deliberately chosen leaders that irl lead many different civilizations - Timur, Victoria, Charlemagne. And they should have gone for more "triples" civilizations, with designs that build on eachother to showcase the strength of the civ switching. I'm still convinced the civ switching mechanic is scuffed in principle, but I would have liked to see Firaxis make a real effort to show it's benefits. Stupid.

 

[j51]

Until the day this game dies (my bet is ~2-3 years) I will question why Firaxis chose to add whatever civs and leaders they thought would be cool rather than those that are best geared towards introducing the Eras system. Picking cool civs may have worked in previous games, but Firaxis knew that this era system would be controversial, so why not try and make that first impression as good as possible? They should have deliberately chosen leaders that irl lead many different civilizations - Timur, Victoria, Charlemagne. And they should have gone for more "triples" civilizations, with designs that build on eachother to showcase the strength of the civ switching. I'm still convinced the civ switching mechanic is scuffed in principle, but I would have liked to see Firaxis make a real effort to show it's benefits. Stupid.

Yeah I remember one reviewer commented that if they were trying to promote civ switching why didn’t they include Byzantium on release? It’s the tailor made example for this!

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Indeed. In the next releases, I'd prefer if they prioritized filling the gaps that make transitions in the Americas and Africa feel chaotic, rather than adding more civilizations at random or from already well-covered regions, such as South and Southeast Asia.

For the Americas:
A proper successor to the Maya
A proper predecessor to the Inca
A proper successor to the Inca
A proper successor to the Shawnee

For Africa:
A proper successor to Aksum
A proper predecessor to Songhai
A proper successor to Songhai
A proper predecessor to Buganda

Once these gaps are filled, I’d like them to take a look at Oceania as well, since Hawaii feels completely out of place without appropriate transitions.

I believe much of the criticism around the civilization transition system stems from the fact that many of the links make absolutely no sense, which causes a massive break in immersion—such as the case of Maya > Inca.

Define 'proper successor'.

Because the unfortunate reality of most of the American native groups is that the actual Successor was a colonial 'state' like Mexico, Brazil, Peru, the United States, etc. Which in every case might be geographical and political 'successors' but are only partially, if at all, cultural successors.

Elsewhere in the world, similar progressions frequently apply, but I many cases In submit that the problem is two-fold:

1. There is no real cultural, political or 'proper' successor because the old polity collapsed completely and even the population was largely replaced by invasion/migration (the Western Roman Problem)

2. The successor and/or predecessor were so similar in so many basic aspects that it is hard to distinguish them adequately for game purposes. As a prime example, between the Shang and the Qing Dynasties of China (approximately 1600 BCE to 1912 CE) there are at least 66 separate Dynasties that ruled all or parts of China. Most of them are simply impossible to distinguish from each other in any game-meaningful way, which is why games seem to always use the same Dynasties: Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that 'proper successor' is likely to always be a judgement call in most or at least many cases, and frequently result in a 'nearly proper' or 'mostly geographic, cultural, and/or political Semi-Proper' succession.

 

[Leucarum]

Define 'proper successor'.

Because the unfortunate reality of most of the American native groups is that the actual Successor was a colonial 'state' like Mexico, Brazil, Peru, the United States, etc. Which in every case might be geographical and political 'successors' but are only partially, if at all, cultural successors.

Elsewhere in the world, similar progressions frequently apply, but I many cases In submit that the problem is two-fold:

1. There is no real cultural, political or 'proper' successor because the old polity collapsed completely and even the population was largely replaced by invasion/migration (the Western Roman Problem)

2. The successor and/or predecessor were so similar in so many basic aspects that it is hard to distinguish them adequately for game purposes. As a prime example, between the Shang and the Qing Dynasties of China (approximately 1600 BCE to 1912 CE) there are at least 66 separate Dynasties that ruled all or parts of China. Most of them are simply impossible to distinguish from each other in any game-meaningful way, which is why games seem to always use the same Dynasties: Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that 'proper successor' is likely to always be a judgement call in most or at least many cases, and frequently result in a 'nearly proper' or 'mostly geographic, cultural, and/or political Semi-Proper' succession.

We're never gonna get a completely satisfying set of civ chains for all the reasons you lay out but there are ways to get closer...

I think 7 already has the ingredients to solve the problem of Colonial states not feeling like acceptable follow-up civs. Buganda already shows that we don't need something to be an politically recognized nation for it to feature in the modern roster, and we have multiple examples of timelines being stretched (Khmer/Mississippians) for example in order for nations to fit. Civs like Haudenosaunee or Maori are great fits for modern for example.

For cases where civs have no successors at all, I really think though that there needs to be an eqvuivalent of "transcendance" from Humankind though for things to feel satisfying. I'd love to see some mechanic where you kept your previous civ but relevant abilities got scaled up to be competitive in the next era. Maybe allow civs to unlock it when they reach the end of a legacy path (so if you do disasterously badly you can't do it).