Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[TylertheDestroyer]

You don't need a lot of sales to get into the top 100. We literally calculated in the other thread that for the position in got to relative to maneater, it represented about 3,000 DLC sales in a week. Thats a spike in sales from their baseline sure, but it's still loss making. Their staff levels require about $40mil a year. So they need a little under $1mil sales a week on average after the cuts of sales houses and publishers.

The sales from the steam chart were about 1/4mil to 1/3mil. That's not a good sign unfortunately.

It's funny that people haven't realized that being in top 100 isn't an achievement for such a large AAA product, it's just expected of them. Dragon Age: Veilgaurd topped steam charts at #2 during it's launch/release, that still didn't change that the game severly underpreformed commercially.

 

[Civinator]

In the German Drogeriemarkt Müller Civ 7 for PS 5 now is reduced to € 29,99. Edit: This is a price reduction of more than 50 %. On the box you can still see the old price label of € 69,99, too. This could indicate, that the sales of the PS 5 version of Civ 7 in Germany were not so good after release.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I've been messing around with chatgpt some more. We know first month sales were about 1mil on steam, and about 1.8mil total according to:

Civilization VII’s March Update Brings Fresh Content, VR Announcements, More - 9meters

Fans of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII have plenty to celebrate this March. Firaxis Games is continuing its strong post-launch support with Update 1.1.0,

9meters.com

Feels about right given the 3mil cap we have from total Civ franchise unit sales in the last year that 1.8mil came from first month Civ VII sales.

Subsequently, steamdbs upper estimate has sales on steam track up from 1mil to about 1.25mil from march to July. Assuming a similar steam to other platform ratio of approx 1:1 as per first month sales-ish, that gives us an additional 500k sales, taking us to about 2.3mil total.

2k and firaxis need about 5-6mil sales to break even as it stands. That would require this game to have a stronger tail than Civ VI. Given current player retention and review scoring, I think that could be difficult.

I think the full pivot away from Civ switching is inevitable to see whether classic mode can draw back more players, as at the moment they are staring at the probability of a lifecycle cash loss.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

If true, it shows that corporate execs rarely fail to come to the wrong conclusions. What they should conclude is that Firaxis needs housecleaning and a change in direction.

I know 2k is the lightning rod for community anger, but I think we should look at Ed Beach who is squarely behind the design of Civ 7. He visited London and wanted to design a game around a civ in layers. Ages, hard resets, civ switching, leaders not matching historical civs, leaders that are not actual leaders but writers and scientists, all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

 

[Kwami]

all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

*part of the player base

A lot of us actually like those decisions and the game.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

If you compare Civ 6 vs Civ 7 credits, it seems that they ballooned the development budget for the latter. Civ 6 had a total of 800 people while Civ 7 had a massive 2600 people working on it.

The exact same situation happened with Skyrim vs. Starfield. Skyrim had a modest workforce which was ballooned with Starfield.

Skyrim, much beloved and critically acclaimed. The most popular of the player base in the series.

Then the production was absolutely bloated up for the highly anticipated next game, which ended up falling flat and destroying the studio's once-vaunted reputation

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

*part of the player base

Sorry, majority of player base. I should recognize the minority of players that do enjoy the game. I didn't mean to imply that "every" player didn't like it.

 

[ombak]

They may already be working on it. Like, what would the dev team do after the game is released? Work on expansion, for example.

If the developer has other projects and they still do things this way, a portion of a team like this could move to the other internal projects while normal expansion work is being done, until they need to ramp up again.

 

[Maiq]

I know 2k is the lightning rod for community anger, but I think we should look at Ed Beach who is squarely behind the design of Civ 7. He visited London and wanted to design a game around a civ in layers. Ages, hard resets, civ switching, leaders not matching historical civs, leaders that are not actual leaders but writers and scientists, all these controversial decisions for this iteration of the series that has turned off the player base, falls on his shoulders.

Yeah, it's cool he got the game he wanted, now he owes the people that allowed him to do that, the game they want.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I've been messing around with chatgpt some more. We know first month sales were about 1mil on steam, and about 1.8mil total according to:

Civilization VII’s March Update Brings Fresh Content, VR Announcements, More - 9meters

Fans of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII have plenty to celebrate this March. Firaxis Games is continuing its strong post-launch support with Update 1.1.0,

9meters.com

Feels about right given the 3mil cap we have from total Civ franchise unit sales in the last year that 1.8mil came from first month Civ VII sales.

Yeah, this fits generally. But it's important to remember that they use very imprecise methods of estimation, so those 1M estimates were actually something between 400K and 2M. I think this 1.8M estimation has huge margin as well.

Regarding the polls. From this poll https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/what-platform-are-you-playing-civilization-vii-on.699150/ (which doesn't differentiate Steam from Epic games) and this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1m8bgr2/what_platform_do_you_use_to_play_civ7

(which does) we could see that Steam on PC and deck has about 84%. But both communities involve mostly old time Civ fans (especially Civ fanatics) and both are English-speaking community, meaning they hugely underrepresent non-English players, especially Asian, where consoles are traditionally strong.

So, I'd say we have total sales around 1-3M by March with 10-40% of them being outside Steam. That's the margin of error we could get from those sources.

It's funny that people haven't realized that being in top 100 isn't an achievement for such a large AAA product, it's just expected of them. Dragon Age: Veilgaurd topped steam charts at #2 during it's launch/release, that still didn't change that the game severly underpreformed commercially.

AAA games are expected to be in top 100 on release, not half a year after. Returning to top 100 that way is an achievement.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

AAA games are expected to be in top 100 on release, not half a year after. Returning to top 100 that way is an achievement.

Just checked and as of right now, Steam has Civ 7 listed as the 159th top seller globally. Of the 158 games ranked above it, 108 of them were released in 2024 or earlier. I'm not sure that appearing in the top 100 six months after release is uncommon. Fallout 76 is ranked 102 right now and it was released in 2020, is not currently on sale, and is (in Canadian dollar terms) $54.99 compared to Civ 7's $89.99. Eurotruck Simulator 2 is ranked 98 right now, was released in 2012, is not currently on sale and is Canadian $25.99 per unit.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Just checked and as of right now, Steam has Civ 7 listed as the 159th top seller globally. Of the 158 games ranked above it, 108 of them were released in 2024 or earlier. I'm not sure that appearing in the top 100 six months after release is uncommon. Fallout 76 is ranked 102 right now and it was released in 2020, is not currently on sale, and is (in Canadian dollar terms) $54.99 compared to Civ 7's $89.99. Eurotruck Simulator 2 is ranked 98 right now, was released in 2012, is not currently on sale and is Canadian $25.99 per unit.

There are 2 things here:

1. Games with in-game markets like Fallout 76 have totally different economics. For example, Counter Strike is constantly on top.
2. For games with the same model like Civ7, they have spike right after DLC and discounts, Eurotruck Simulator recently got both. It was on sale for $5 last week

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

There are 2 things here:

1. Games with in-game markets like Fallout 76 have totally different economics. For example, Counter Strike is constantly on top.
2. For games with the same model like Civ7, they have spike right after DLC and discounts, Eurotruck Simulator recently got both. It was on sale for $5 last week

Yes, the micro-transaction market definitely dominates. Its no wonder game studios love them. I didn't realize Fallout 76 fell into that category. I thought it was more like Civ 7 or Eurotruck.

 

[itix]

I asked Gemini to compile a list of Firaxis employees who worked on Civ 6 and Civ 7. The list excludes directors (like the president of Firaxis or Sid Meyer):

Gemini listed 181 unique names for Civ 6 but only 143 unique names for Civ 7.

It is surprising, but there can be many natural reasons. For example, Anton Strenger is mentioned in Civ 7 credits, although he left Firaxis years ago. During Civ 6 development, maybe they had more spare employees to work a little here and there, gaining credits. Or the in-house team is truly smaller for Civ 7. Or, perhaps they used more subcontractors.

 

[Core Imposter]

As someone noted above, Firaxis has dropped two duds in a row and one of those, Midnight Suns, they switched into that from preplanning for another XCOM game that was put into limbo. Then the lead designer for XCOM/Suns left the company to start a venture of his own. So, what the heck are they going to do? Reconfigure the staff is the most likely answer. Certainly, interesting to speculate about.