Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Smegger213]

Just curious if you could be a little more specific by what you mean when you say "trend"?

The trend towards more negative reviews.
EG its been at 53% negative for about the last 2 to 3 months, and its taken ages for the negative % to drop.
Its now at 52.9%, but at least its a drop.

 

[Kwami]

The trend towards more negative reviews.
EG its been at 53% negative for about the last 2 to 3 months, and its taken ages for the negative % to drop.
Its now at 52.9%, but at least its a drop.

The trend is indisputably positive. Reviews have improved since the low point. The overall totals still tilt negative, but less than before.

 

[Smegger213]

The trend is indisputably positive. Reviews have improved since the low point. The overall totals still tilt negative, but less than before.

No it isn't. 2 of the last 3 weeks have had a small shift towards positive. There needs to be a lot more weeks of positive reviews before you can call it a trend.

 

[Kev1916]

The trend is indisputably positive. Reviews have improved since the low point. The overall totals still tilt negative, but less than before.

Sigh , it is not "Indisputably" positive, the Month of October had more Negative overall total than positive .

Thems are the facts both on steam and steam "db".

 

[Leucarum]

What is the minimum statement you would accept as true?

Something like "Reviews are currently improving but still not as good as would be desireable for Firaxis? And they could just as easily start going down again."

 

[PlatinumPoster]

Sigh , it is not "Indisputably" positive, the Month of October had more Negative overall total than positive .

Thems are the facts both on steam and steam "db".

What they mean is that the percentage of those reviews that are negative is less than they were before.

Its pretty normal stats language, but I can see why that may not be obvious

 

[Kwami]

Sigh , it is not "Indisputably" positive, the Month of October had more Negative overall total than positive .

Thems are the facts both on steam and steam "db".

You obviously don't know what "trend" means.

 

[Kev1916]

You obviously don't know what "trend" means.

I do , no obviously about it thank you .
You trending daily or hourly ?

 

[Smegger213]

Tomorrow we will ve able to get the full month of Octobers figures. Both in player numbers, and reviews. Then you can compare October against other months.

 

[Smegger213]

Well, its the 1st November. So, now we can get a total count of reviews for the month of October.

489 positive reviews.
542 negative reviews.
47.43% positive.

Now, I know the naysayers will say that the bulk of negative reviews were at the start of the month.
Well, you can see that this is not the case. Yes, there were 4 large spikes negative in the 1st week of the month, but there was also a large number of positive reviews over the same period.
There was also a few days in the middle and end of the month that saw a good number of negative reviews.
But, over the whole month, the trend is still negative.

As to player numbers?
Well, SteamDB hasn't put up the average and peak numbers for October yet.
But the 30 day figures are listed as:
Peak 12617, average 6618.
That peak occurred on Sunday 5th Oct. After that every weekend dropped slightly.
The 30 day average figure is a lot higher than Septembers number. But its still lower than June, July & August's averages.
So, although the average for October is a lot better than September, its still not getting higher than June, July & August.

In conclusion, I think we have got a lot more to go before we can say that the reviews and player numbers are getting a lot better.

 

[Siptah]

Going through some reviews for EUV, it might not be that dangerous to civ‘s player numbers after all. German GameStar even gave a warning to wait for some months/years before you jump in, because the test version was crashing and in many ways broken. Their tentative score (80/100) is similar to civ 7, but they currently deduct 20 temporarily until it is in better state, which would put it as 60/100. (which hurts the EUIV fan in me).

So, maybe the patch on Tuesday (which coincides with EUV release) might have a similar impact than the last one? Or maybe even bigger, because the DLC is for everybody?

 

[IntelligentDisk]

In conclusion, I think we have got a lot more to go before we can say that the reviews and player numbers are getting a lot better.

Reviews have gotten a lot better and are currently the best they've ever been.

• On October 31st we had the best reviewed day and the first "very positive" day at 94.1% positive (16 positive, 1 negative)
• We're currently in the best reviewed week period ever at 58% positive (109 positive, 79 negative)
• We're currently in the best reviewed 2 week period ever at 54% positive (195 positive, 166 negative)
• We're currently in the best reviewed 4 week period since just after launch at 50.2% positive (419 positive, 415 negative)
• We're currently in the best reviewed 30 day period since just after launch at 48.2% positive (449 positive, 483 negative)

All of these are shown in the following graphs:

Reviews for October were at 48% positive (501 positive, 542 negative, 1,043 total). This is a 7% - 20% increase compared to the previous 5 months, and the best reviewed calendar month since launch month.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

As for players, October saw the highest peak concurrent player week for 21 weeks (9,990) but by the end dropped down to 8,071 which is the 6th lowest behind the 4 weeks in September and a week in June. Overall for the calendar month of October, it was slightly behind June to August.

• February - 55,357
• March - 24,450
• April - 13,395
• May - 10,188
• June - 8,890
• July - 8,990
• August - 8,920
• September - 7,559
• October - 8,774

As @Smegger213 said, the average follows these peaks where October is lower than the June - August period but a lot better than September.

 

[stealth_nsk]

One of the things to note is that both significant falls on this graph were during sales (one of the theories is that sales attract some category of skeptical old fans who decide to try the game when it's cheap).

I have a strong guess that patch and the first part of the DLC pack content will be timed with Autumn sale (and second part of the DLC pack content - with Christmas sale). I think the real trend breaker will be if those sales will not bring that big drops.

 

[Crashdummy]

Even with a higher Peak, October ended up with a lower average than both July and August

I think Civ 7 stabilized itself around these numbers. Time will tell if the improvement on reviews of the last couple of weeks stay, which would be good news even if it will not change the bigger picture because there are too many reviews done to affect any average

In summary, i think this is the first step that Civ 7 needed to try to get out of the situation it is. Stabilize first, then try to get out. Recent announcement might give skeptical players hope for the future and they might stop them from being execisevely negative

 

[Nikolai II]

Going through some reviews for EUV, it might not be that dangerous to civ‘s player numbers after all. German GameStar even gave a warning to wait for some months/years before you jump in, because the test version was crashing and in many ways broken. Their tentative score (80/100) is similar to civ 7, but they currently deduct 20 temporarily until it is in better state, which would put it as 60/100. (which hurts the EUIV fan in me).

So, maybe the patch on Tuesday (which coincides with EUV release) might have a similar impact than the last one? Or maybe even bigger, because the DLC is for everybody?

Stability seems to be a case by case basis. Most CCs report great stability, having almost no crashes to none at all. ISorrowProduction OTOH reports crashes every 2-3 years.

 

[Siptah]

Stability seems to be a case by case basis. Most CCs report great stability, having almost no crashes to none at all. ISorrowProduction OTOH reports crashes every 2-3 years.

It would be really great if stability would actually be good for most players. When they announced it will be PC only (despite their games running really well on macs, and often better than on windows), I hoped this would at least mean good performance and no technical difficulties. Apparently, performance is rather good – but I've heard from crashes ruining saves permanently from several sources now. Some combinations of decision seem to lead to inevitable and reproducible crashes down the line, apparently mostly due to the so-called situation. At least that makes it looks like it can be fixed rather quickly. Still, I'm not too optimistic that the launch will be as successful as I wish it would be. But that's good for the civ 7 patch – at least for me, I'll play the new civ 7 patch first, an then try EU5 in some months, despite having bought it the day it was announced due to the many, many hours I have in EU4 (the only game in my Steam library that shows well above 1000 hours).

 

[itix]

Reviews have gotten a lot better and are currently the best they've ever been.

• On October 31st we had the best reviewed day and the first "very positive" day at 94.1% positive (16 positive, 1 negative)

Steam shows 7 positive and 5 negative. Does that mean 9 were bought externally and 4 negative reviews were refunded?

 

[itix]

Going through some reviews for EUV, it might not be that dangerous to civ‘s player numbers after all. German GameStar even gave a warning to wait for some months/years before you jump in, because the test version was crashing and in many ways broken. Their tentative score (80/100) is similar to civ 7, but they currently deduct 20 temporarily until it is in better state, which would put it as 60/100. (which hurts the EUIV fan in me).

80/100 is not a very good score. Magazine reviewers are often fans of the franchise and tend to give better scores than casual gamers.

On the other hand, I dont expect stability issues to have an immediate impact on player counts. New players try it for a while until they give it up. The next weekend is going to be critical for EUV. But the impact on each other is probably very small. EU is not a big franchise, and Civ 7 sales are quite slow atm, they dont really cancel each other right now.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

Steam shows 7 positive and 5 negative. Does that mean 9 were bought externally and 4 negative reviews were refunded?

Negative reviews stay even if the user ends up refunding the game. As far as I know, any discrepancies will be because either:

1. Steam only counts Steam purchases in their graph whereas SteamDB counts all.
2. Time/date differences. Steams count starts on the 5th February, SteamDBs starts on the 6th. The game was released into "early access" on the 6th for the majority of players, but because of time zone differences this meant the game came online for some players at 9pm on the 5th February, so Steam starts the count on the 5th. This is also why on Steam it states the game launched on 10th February even though the "global launch" was on the 11th February.