Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[IntelligentDisk]

Getting recent reviews above 70 or even 80, should not be too hard if the recent spike in positive reviews is natural and can be sustained. These numbers will increase fairly quickly as more positive reviews come in at one end, and negative ones fall off at the other end.

All time reviews may be a lost cause, though. Civ 7 has more than 20 000 negative reviews, and to counter that, you would need about 30 000 more positive reviews. Just for fun, I ran the numbers, and it seems if we get 200 reviews per day, and these are 83% positive, it would still take well over 300 days to get past the 70% threshold. To be fair, it isn't entirely impossible. Civ 6 has 265 000 reviews total, Civ 7 isn't anywhere near that yet. I do think it is unlikely though. I've watched how difficult it can be to change the all time reviews. Most interest in a game, and the biggest influx of reviews, is at launch. One game I've been particularly interested in, is Ara: History Untold. That one was not received terribly, and landed around 67%. With several major patches and free content, its positive reviews has generally been varying between Mostly Positive and Very Positive, and it still was an incredibly slow crawl to get past 70%, which is where it currently sits. It's an issue that every new negative review has to be countered by about 3 positive ones in order to continue moving in the right direction.

Anyway, with regards to Civ 7, my conditions for buying it is probably Mostly Positive recent reviews, combined with a good discount. For me, the pricing and general publisher nonesense has been as much of an issue as any scepticism towards the game itself. Just the base game is 829 NOK where I live. At the time it was released, I could literally not find another game on Steam with a higher base price.

It'll no doubt take years before the overall rating on Steam can reach 70%. Rapid improvement is possible though as we saw with Civ VI going from 69% positive in October 2019 to 80% positive in May 2020, or No Man's Sky going from 37% to 47% within 2 months (82k to 95k reviews) and subsequently going from 47% to 70% after 3 years. I think 2 things will need to be true before any sort of "rapid improvement" is possible: 1. bigger sales where Civ VII is available for $10-$30 causing an influx of players and thus reviews and 2. continuous big improvements to the game either through expansions or free updates. I think we can all agree Civ VII has tremendous room for improvement. It'll be fascinating to see what happens to the reviews and player counts once the 'one Civ' mode and Legacy Path changes come to fruition.

 

[KayAU]

Personally I don't think using Steam reviews as a requirement for buying the game is that effective when there are so many resources availble such as lets plays and gameplay videos available on youtube.

Yeah, fair enough. It's not the only thing I go by, and there are clearly examples of games which are below 70% on Steam, which I still really enjoy. The actual requirement is a bit fluffier, I will buy the game when I believe it is good, and it is a decent value for money. Recent Steam reviews are decent indicator, though.

One thing which could accelerate my decision, would be a free weekend, preferably combined with a sale, like Ara is doing right now. Then I could try it out and get a feel for it myself.

With regards to Civ 7 being dead, I think it is clearly not. It is underperforming expectations, for sure, but its player numbers are still a lot higher than most other games in the genre, and it is continually developed. The most successful Civ-likes out there are still a long way off 4-5k concurrent players.