Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[aieeegrunt]

We don't have this info.

Ah ok I figured that was the answer but I thought someone was claiming they did

 

[fantsu]

Scale it with the fact that every year, Steam has more and more users.

In fact, we can suspect that the franchise has been in decline since Civ V.

Yeah, there are some players that wont touch Steam, me included.
Its one if the reasons also why the series have gone this way towards more casual audience on complexity.

 

[Evolena]

Or maybe it's just that gaming isn't reserved to an interested small population anymore, and games adapt, like everything else in the world.
My SO was noticing a trend of designing games with streaming in mind, with a pacing allowing for chat interaction.

 

[youngsteve]

did it not take brave new world expansion ( 2nd expansion ) for civ5 to overtake player numbers for civ4. similar for civ6 to overtake civ5

I think you and others are missing the point when you keep saying earlier game were behind the numbers of its predecessor. Civ 5 is not Civ 7 predecessor, but two games ago in its franchise. It is unheard of for A list games to be way behind versions of the franchise that were released 15 years before, & preceded this game by 2 in the same franchise. It is like Paradox fans being cool that EU4 was way behind EU2 or CK3 way behind CK1. I am pretty sure when the new EU5 is released, whatever its condition, it won't be trailing players playing EU3 within months.

 

[Doratov]

That's one of the factors why simultaneous player number isn't representative for comparison between Civ7 and earlier games, but not the only one. Polls here and on Reddit show that about 85% play the game of Steam. Sure, the selection is really small and hardly representative, because both communities mostly consist of old time Civ players and both communities use English language. Still, I think it would be safe to say that the majority of Civ7 players use Steam.

These are just assumptions as well, no one knows how the player base is split. What if a lot of people opted for the Epic store because of the 20% cashback? What if there are like 6-7000 concurrent users out there, playing parallel to the Steam players? Who's to say that is something that's out of line?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Yeah, there are some players that wont touch Steam, me included.
Its one if the reasons also why the series have gone this way towards more casual audience on complexity.

There's no way it's "more casual on complexity," sorry. Fire up CivIII. You can argue over whether the added details and layers are necessary or right, but not that there aren't a ton of moving parts.

 

[stealth_nsk]

These are just assumptions as well, no one knows how the player base is split. What if a lot of people opted for the Epic store because of the 20% cashback? What if there are like 6-7000 concurrent users out there, playing parallel to the Steam players? Who's to say that is something that's out of line?

Yes, sure. As I wrote, representation is weak. There could be a lot of Asian players who don't participate in English-speaking communities and play Civ7 exclusively on consoles. Or so called "casual" players not participating in communities and playing on some other platforms.

All this is possible, but we don't have any sources towards them, so by default I'd say that it's most likely Steam is still the major platform. Not guaranteed, though.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Does Civ 7 play enough similarly on all platforms that a Let's Play would be equally applicable to all of them?

If so, then the relative paucity of Let's Plays by the major YouTubers tells us something about sales across platforms.

I've said it once before, but here are people whose livelihoods are based on posting content connected with a particular game. If there was an audience for such content, they'd gladly be developing and posting it. I don't think there's some secret crowd of console purchasers, way out of scale with PC purchasers and not showing up in the Steam figures, that would suggest that sales on those other platforms are any more robust than PC sales. If anything, they might be lower there, since Civ games tend to be experienced best on PC.

So the "who knows how it might be doing on other platforms" argument doesn't hold a lot of water for me.

 

[Kev1916]

Yeah, there are some players that wont touch Steam, me included.
Its one if the reasons also why the series have gone this way towards more casual audience on complexity.

Correct, thou after many years I’ve actually got used to steam .

“Civ” VII does lack complexity and that is to again suit a casual audience using a broad platform of devices.
I’m hoping ( thou doubt it will happen ) that a company can create a serious PC Civ game

 

[Gorbles]

Correct, thou after many years I’ve actually got used to steam .

“Civ” VII does lack complexity and that is to again suit a casual audience using a broad platform of devices.
I’m hoping ( thou doubt it will happen ) that a company can create a serious PC Civ game

The game that was criticised for its lack of signposting and its failure to communicate gameplay principles through a lacklustre UI can be called many things. "lacking complexity" isn't one.

 

[nakzox]

I feel strongly confident that there aren't secret hordes of people playing this game on the Epic Store or consoles at this point.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Does Civ 7 play enough similarly on all platforms that a Let's Play would be equally applicable to all of them?

If so, then the relative paucity of Let's Plays by the major YouTubers tells us something about sales across platforms.

I've said it once before, but here are people whose livelihoods are based on posting content connected with a particular game. If there was an audience for such content, they'd gladly be developing and posting it. I don't think there's some secret crowd of console purchasers, way out of scale with PC purchasers and not showing up in the Steam figures, that would suggest that sales on those other platforms are any more robust than PC sales. If anything, they might be lower there, since Civ games tend to be experienced best on PC.

So the "who knows how it might be doing on other platforms" argument doesn't hold a lot of water for me.

Ya the super secret legions of console players who’s existence is a closely guarded secret seems like a super reach to me

 

[stealth_nsk]

I feel strongly confident that there aren't secret hordes of people playing this game on the Epic Store or consoles at this point.

Nobody claimed that. The discussion was about how simultaneous players number has weak correlation with other data we know about.

 

[Siddorm]

In October so far, 46/113 Steam reviews have been positive. So, sentiment remains mixed now, 8 months after release.

 

[bladex1200]

I’m hoping ( thou doubt it will happen ) that a company can create a serious PC Civ game

Again per my earlier post, companies are perfectly capable of creating whatever people think is a "serious" PC civ game; their refusal to do so is more likely indicative of the risk in market share rather than some kind of crippling inability to produce.

Civ as a franchise is dominant in the 4x space BECAUSE it is accessible; it's no longer the exclusive juggernaut it was in earlier decades, a lot of 4x players are now branching into grand strategy titles where companies like Paradox are king. As a result, Civ has had to pivot and its chosen pivot has been to a more accessible, board-game-like style of gameplay with more systems complexity and less of an overall focus on verisimilitude and historicity (in which Civ would likely lose to any grand strategy competition, having necessarily less-historical rules on the basis of having a "win" condition that requires a single civ have insane map or tech or cultural dominance, something that basically never reflects real life civilizations).

As someone who really disliked Civ 7's direction and terrible release UI and bugs, I don't think that any naysaying on the basis of the core design is objective. It's simply reflective of the fact that the tastes of players who dislike Civ 7 are likely better served by different franchises whose scope can remain more "hardcore"/limited due to smaller budgets. Firaxis experienced explosive growth with Civ 5 and 6, it was inevitable that the only market growth left is now in the more mainstream player bases who most likely would choose it because it's more flavorful and board-gamey and less spreadsheet/crunchy than a grand strategy game.

 

[Gorbles]

I played Civ 1 as a kid, without a spreadsheet.

This weird insistence that games have, or cater to, to follow a person as they age, seems to come with forgetting that most, if not all of us, started when we were younger. Significantly so in a bunch of cases. Something becoming more accessible on a certain axis doesn't mean it has to be void of depth on other axes. That is a claim, and claims need evidencing (to be taken seriously).

 

[bladex1200]

I played Civ 1 as a kid, without a spreadsheet.

I mean I played civ 3 and 4 as a kid without knowing what I was doing, either, and I got whipped repeatedly by Prince AI

This weird insistence that games have, or cater to, to follow a person as they age, seems to come with forgetting that most, if not all of us, started when we were younger. Significantly so in a bunch of cases.

I mean, from a company perspective, if a game won't follow the audience as it ages then it needs to capture a larger-and-larger youth audience as its existing audience ages-out. You can't just expect shareholders to be okay with franchise profits shrinking - they want year-over-year growth. So preserving your existing audience is in the company's best interest as you grow a new audience. It's why some of the most successful entertainment companies in the world like Disney take steps to explicitly cultivate and incorporate older-audience-targeted experiences (the much-despised "Disney Adults" get adult-focused evenings and the parks now sell way more booze than they used to, as well as testing experiences like the Star Wars RP hotel and more adult-oriented Disney+ content), because their growth has hit a critical mass where they can no longer simply subsist on grabbing the next generation of kids, they have retain at least some childless adults as big spenders.

 

[Kev1916]

The game that was criticised for its lack of signposting and its failure to communicate gameplay principles through a lacklustre UI can be called many things. "lacking complexity" isn't one.

Eh no a lacklustre UI should be called
Lacklustre.
A game lacking complexity to cater to say a switch console is well just what it is .

 

[Kev1916]

Firaxis experienced explosive growth with Civ 5 and 6, it was inevitable that the only market growth left is now in the more mainstream player bases who most likely would choose it because it's more flavorful and board-gamey and less spreadsheet/crunchy than a grand strategy game.

So had that direction failed?
Currently civ vii pulls in what about 10% of the current Civ players

 

[Gori the Grey]

Firaxis experienced explosive growth with Civ 5 and 6, it was inevitable that the only market growth left is now in the more mainstream player bases who most likely would choose it because it's more flavorful and board-gamey and less spreadsheet/crunchy than a grand strategy game.

I think this is right, but there's some maximum limit to this reach. Civ (well, anything recognizable as Civ to most of us) is never going to get many "casual" gamers. It's not a casual game! You play it over hundreds of turns, where you attend to thousands of individual micro-decisions, all ideally gradually aggregating to a victory. So it involves focused and sustained attention. Moreover, it's history based, and huge swathes of the population regard interest in history as geeky.

I think this is a (super-complex) marketing-and-design balance to try to strike. I once asked it this way: if you appealed only to hard-core strategists (the ones who love 4, say), how large a customer base could you reasonably hope to reach? That would set your sales. And that in turn would set your development budget. With that size budget could you make such a game?