I get your point but 7 is closer to a 10k peak and falling.
But people can always say well, there are actually lots of people playing on some other place we can’t see, and they are really happy and leaving positive reviews on some site we haven’t discovered yet, and you can never really prove them wrong and they don’t seem to accept that it’s a kind of magical thinking.
I’d rather base my estimations on imperfect, incomplete evidence, knowing they might be adjusted later as other new evidence comes in, than hop on a one way ticket to imagination land even (especially) if it confirms what I wish were true.
Yeah, I think it's pretty un-deniable that the PC numbers are not in a great place right now.
I do think though when discussing the state of the franchise, as the thread was started about, there's a lot more at play. Yeah, I doubt the VR sales are saving the franchise, but the numbers none of us have even come close to speculating are console sales. Is it 10k copies? 100k copies? 1m copies? 10m copies? We know they put a lot of effort to get console sales and users, so for all we know, there's more players playing civ 7 right now than were playing civ 5 or 6 at the same points after launch, just that people are playing on different platforms.
Or maybe they're not. Again, we don't really know. But at least in terms of anecdotal evidence, I feel that reddit does seem to have a lot of threads and pictures from console players, it's probably almost 50/50 to PC. Now, again, how that translates to sales, we don't know. Console civ users are probably newer, so maybe post more questions. The console versions have been buggier, so maybe they need to post more as well. Or maybe just age, demographics, etc... can lead to more posts there.
On the whole, give they are probably around 1m PC game sales, when you add it to the console sales, I don't think that Firaxis will have lost enough money from the release to go out of business tomorrow. It might be hurting the top level executives, and that might have an impact on what kind of runway is possible for future products.
But, that being said, this release to me feels a bit like the civ 5 release. In that it came with a rocky start, changed a lot of pieces, and had some controversy in what they changed. But then like we saw with civ 5, Gods and Kings basically brought it back from the dead. There's certainly enough in the civ 7 core that it's not impossible for a similar fate.
But, on the flipside, with a rocky launch, they have probably lost the history and goodwill. The only reason the game is probably eking out as a commercially viable product is because they have fans that were willing to spend 70$ or 130$ based on the franchise track record. If they decided to cut their losses, close up civ 7, and announce civ 8 is coming out in 2 years (or 4 years or whenever), I doubt you'd see quite as many people lining up to pre-order. If they come out with a meh expansion, and ratings continue to be mixed, you might get the execs a little more wary of committing 20m or 50m or 100m or whatever the development budget is for the next game that they have to front before they can get some of that back with pre-orders.
) it's most likely majority. Day one buyers are fans. One other option included in that count I can think of is migration to consoles, but I still don't buy that such PC centric franchise would have major drift of old fans in that direction.
