Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

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If someone unhappy with the game still buys every DLC that's indeed quite a great customer. That said it's likely such a cold reception will drive the figures down on average andespecially for DLCs which is a huge revenue stream for these games. It's basically the whole business model ofthis franchise nowadays: Release a base game that hooks people and offer overpriced DLC to scratch their impulsive spending hitch. If the hook underperforms it's obviously a huge concern.

Totally , thats why IMHO the next expansion will following the same overpriced con - $60+ For a 4th Age with a 1/2 dozen or so new leaders/Civs .

Once the trust goes , I dont believe there's that many "great" customers to carry this version long term .

Once bitten twice shy
 
I actually wanted to think a bit on this graph
View attachment 741195
We quite easily accepted that with the discount and settler edition Civ7 got an influx of new players, who left a lot of negative reviews and went further. But the real interesting question - why those reviews were mostly negative, but reviews before stabilized on mixed and maybe even slightly positive? What's the difference between audiences in those parts? I see some possible explanations:
  1. The audience who purchased the game during this big discount mostly consisted of old-time civ fans who didn't want to pay full price, but had the game in their wishlist. Now they bought it and reacted like a significant part of old time fans. However, this assumes that the mixed reviews before were left by some other people - so these are some random purchases happening from people not very familiar with the game?
  2. People tend to leave negative reviews immediately after the game purchase, but if they play for some time, they leave more positive reviews, maybe even changing their original negative ones. This could explain pretty quick stabilization to mixed soon after the discount
  3. Expansion on previous point - seeing the game improved with patches, people look at the game in more positive way than if they jump in and see the current state of the game
I'm really curious to know which factors are actually in play here.
How big is the factor of players purchasing the game and going into it with a negative mindset because of the negative reviews and everything negative they've read on the game?
 
Its not. Reddit has fanatics that can bury threads with dislikes, which cant be done here. There were a lot of negative threads near the launch, but the people writing there moved away from it because of the terrible system

Discord is HEAVILY moderated

The most "true" place to get feedback is youtube and maybe X, where people get the notification of a new message from Firaxis or from a content crator and get reminder of the game
"Bury threads with dislikes" yet some of the most upvoted posts of the past year and past month in that subreddit are negative and not positive.
 
How big is the factor of players purchasing the game and going into it with a negative mindset because of the negative reviews and everything negative they've read on the game?
This is circuitous and not particularly helpful, in my opinion. You can't blame consumers for being dissatisfied with a product they have purchased.
 
What I mean here is that the game with the development cost of Civilization and the audience of Civilization can't pay for itself by selling base game only. It need to segment users both up (by upselling with DLC and expansions) and down (with discounts).
Then they should be super concerned.
 
How big is the factor of players purchasing the game and going into it with a negative mindset because of the negative reviews and everything negative they've read on the game?

This could easily come the other way. How big is the factor of players who pre-ordered the game and then try to gaslight themselves into thinking they didn't waste their money?

This and that argument are both stupid because you're generalising all the positive or negative reviews due to some factor of the reviewer you couldn't possibly know.
 
the perception of the game is that it's just absolute garbage and dogshit when thats the furthest from the case - its realistically just a bad to mid civ game (i.e a 5 or 6 out of 10.)
I mean it somehow manages to be the best and worst of Civ simultaneously. Antiquity compared to modern get dramatically different scores. I think that's the most frustrating part. You can plainly see how great the game could be.

Looking forward to seeing what games you pivot towards!
 
This is circuitous and not particularly helpful, in my opinion. You can't blame consumers for being dissatisfied with a product they have purchased.
The point still stands. People are influenced by popular opinion. Despite the Steam reviews showing a near 50/50 split in terms of recommendations, I've seen many many people claim that Civ VII is "universally disliked" because its Steam rating is 47%. Most people consider the popular opinion on Civ VII to be negative.
 
This could easily come the other way. How big is the factor of players who pre-ordered the game and then try to gaslight themselves into thinking they didn't waste their money?

This and that argument are both stupid because you're generalising all the positive or negative reviews due to some factor of the reviewer you couldn't possibly know.
My point was that the popular opinion on Civ VII is to hate it, so it can't easily go the other way. If the popular opinion was positive then this too would influence people's mindset going into the game.
 
Its not. Reddit has fanatics that can bury threads with dislikes, which cant be done here. There were a lot of negative threads near the launch, but the people writing there moved away from it because of the terrible system

Discord is HEAVILY moderated

The most "true" place to get feedback is youtube and maybe X, where people get the notification of a new message from Firaxis or from a content crator and get reminder of the game
The comment section of this video is pivoting around Reddit threads that asks for harsher Age transition?
That is, yt comment sections are being poisoned by Reddidiots.

The whole "you can't ask for changing the Civ switching" because it's a core feature is braindead.
Streamlining by removing workers, removing Units perks, breaking the game into three. Those are not core features.
Those are signs of gamers giving up on what Civ meant to be and trying to cope without choking to death.

The new "BOSS" also in Jumbo Pixel Video is a massive copium exercise.
The fact that the Head resigned or has been made to resign, it only means the heads have no intentions of changing directions
and the next Civ 8 will be a completely Android game and we'll have to pay for Mouse support.

They need to separate the Game designer, Tech PM, from the guys that never touched Civ 3 one minute in their whole life and do not understand what
the foundations of Civ are.

Show me your last save of Civ3. This should be asked in the curriculum. It's the ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING.
There is not a single line in the new head announcement talking about it.
There is a complete disconnection from the gamers perspective and reality and expectations are completely antitethical.

 
People were getting more views streaming Expedition 33 and Kiingdom Come 2 than discussing hot takes, i wonder why?

Maybe because those were actually good games that the players liked, unlike Civ VII?
I am trying to learn the procedures of this forum to better engage in conversation. On a review of this “steam charts” for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I was shocked to find that the average number of daily players has declined over 90% since launch, and now has fewer players than Skyrim, a nearly 14 year old game.

Clearly no game this year can avoid becoming, as the kids say, “a flop”.
 
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The point still stands. People are influenced by popular opinion. Despite the Steam reviews showing a near 50/50 split in terms of recommendations, I've seen many many people claim that Civ VII is "universally disliked" because its Steam rating is 47%. Most people consider the popular opinion on Civ VII to be negative.
Isn't it fair to say that a significant portion of the franchise's fans chose to not buy the game based on how the game is designed/plays? By definition, their perception of the game is negative. The people you want to buy the game are most likely more critical of the features, than those that already bought it. I would say that the overall sentiment surrounding the game is much worse than 50/50. It's simple logic.
 
How big is the factor of players purchasing the game and going into it with a negative mindset because of the negative reviews and everything negative they've read on the game?
Blame the audience territory. Countless reviews and videos have gone into great detail about why the game isn't enjoyable. Tons of people bought and played it themselves and stopped playing.

The game itself is full of flaws from egregious bugs that are never fixed, cumbersome and ugly UI that isn't updated, poor design choices, inadequate implementation of ideas, terrible gameplay (religion, modern age culture). Even combat, a core mechanic if there ever is one for this game, can grow tedious just in unpacking commanders, and that's not even considering how many patches have changed little things there.
 
Isn't it fair to say that a significant portion of the franchise's fans chose to not buy the game based on how the game is designed/plays? By definition, their perception of the game is negative. The people you want to buy the game are most likely more critical of the features, than those that already bought it. I would say that the overall sentiment surrounding the game is much worse than 50/50. It's simple logic.
When the game has so few concurrent active players, half of its reviews are negative, what is this weird gaslighting effort to convince us that Civ 7 is only bad and failing "in our minds"? This is has been a constant since unhappiness with the released product began.

There are problems with Civ 7 at almost every layer. Even the fact that it looks good is undermined by how its look clashes with being able to discern information a lot of the time and the modern age brown blob urban sprawl problem.

Some people might still like the game, but they are a very small group, and anyone suggesting that dislike of the game is some illusion is just wrong at this point.
 
"Bury threads with dislikes" yet some of the most upvoted posts of the past year and past month in that subreddit are negative and not positive.
There's a brigade of "top 1%" posters on the subreddit that seem to browse new 24/7 and immediately downvote all negative posts. Even a comment in a post that says something like "yeah not feeling this game" get -22 downvotes within minutes.

There are tons and tons of negative posts, proving that this is a popular sentiment, but then a brigade of downvotes by a minority of super-active users that specifically downvote anything that's negative.
 
Again, speaking from hindsight. The process of creating a product that would be released several years down the line doesn't get that benefit.
Of course it doesn't. Building new stuff is risky. That makes the decision of Firaxis to completely change the formula of Civ baffling. They didnt take their founders rule of thumb (rule of thirds) seriously, because they thought they knew their audience and knew better than someone who actually knew his audience and product development. They doubled-down on their supposed intellectual superiority - telling people this is what you want, and this is how the game should be played, and this is why its good, etc... But, they dont know their audience and dont know their product, and they failed.
 
My point was that the popular opinion on Civ VII is to hate it, so it can't easily go the other way. If the popular opinion was positive then this too would influence people's mindset going into the game.

You may be surprised to hear this, but many, many people are capable of actual independant thought and making choices.

It’s amazing the lengths people will go to to avoid the simple truth that Civ7 is simply not the game many people want to play

This time the excuse is *checks notes* brainwashing.

Using ChatGPT to try and prove the existence of millions of phantom console users is going to be tough to beat, but this was a good effort.

There's a brigade of "top 1%" posters on the subreddit that seem to browse new 24/7 and immediately downvote all negative posts. Even a comment in a post that says something like "yeah not feeling this game" get -22 downvotes within minutes.

There are tons and tons of negative posts, proving that this is a popular sentiment, but then a brigade of downvotes by a minority of super-active users that specifically downvote anything that's negative.

Reddit is a disgusting cesspool of pathetic weak people who cannot abide any disagreement, and resort to cowardly behavior like this
 
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