In all three replies above, the reviews from the less-than-thirty-days filter which serves your contentions is deemed to be valuable, while my illumination that it's a meager representation of the total audience is discarded. All three replies likewise elect to skip the part where I point out the actual total number of reviews is small enough to render the entire dataset of little value in indicating consensus. That all smacks soundly of confirmation bias.
As for bad publicity damaging the publishers. Civ VI is already a success, critically and commerically, and that it carried most of the gripes over from Civ V didn't impact that success. The list of gripes with Civ VI's AI simply don't compare to the launch issues with Sim City, as you yourself say that most games have positive receptions when released. Civ VI did, Sim City didn't.
TLDR: Like it or not, for better or worse, the game's doing fine and there's a dearth of evidence of any consensus that the game is in an unacceptable state.
The bold is just
not true. You yourself said that we're talking about 19,000 reviews here. That's
twenty times as big as the average political poll. It's
at least twenty times as big as the test group of your average scientific experiment, and might even be
a hundred times as big.
Let me make a practical example: Imagine that, on average, 70% of the players thinks the game is good (I'm using numbers that make calculating easy, btw, without regard of wheter they might make sense). On top of that, I assume that there are infinite players playing the game, as that eases up the mathematics. Considering I'm working with relatively small numbers and a player base that goes into millions, you'd need to look at a
lot of decimals before noticing a difference. Now, lets take two different sample sizes.
First, we're going to look at 10 players being asked their opinion. If the representation is perfect, 7 will say the game is good, 3 will say the game is bad. What's the ratio of the chance, however, that only 6 people call the game good, and 4 people call the game bad instead of 7 people saying the game is good at 3 saying the game is bad? (6! * 0.7^6 * 4! * 0.3^4)/(7! * 0.7^7 * 3! * 0.3^3) * 100% = 24.5%
Now, we're going to look at 50 players being asked their opinion. What's the chance of a 30:20 compared to a 35:15? We multiply every number (except the 0.7 and 0.3) by 5: 0.07% chance. I can't go much bigger because I'm using a simple calculator to calculate this and I forgot the
efficient way to calculate it, but remember that you have to go
two hundred times as big, while I just only went 5 times as big and already saw the chance drop by a factor 350.
That is the strength of big numbers, and
that is why a 19,000 sample size is
more than enough.
And to return again to the bias:
Positive people leave reviews much more often than negative people. This is called the "positive bias", and it works like this because of how people work. First off, there is a large group of people that doesn't use the review system. They are just not interested in it, and no matter what they think of the game, they won't use it. The rest of the people fall into several categories: First of all, there's a group that's enjoying the game, and they leave a positive review to get others into the game. Then there's also a group that doesn't enjoy the game. But they don't all leave reviews, even though they don't fall in the group that by definition doesn't use the review system. Many of them will certainly leave a negative review, but there's also people out there that tried the game, didn't like it, and just moved on. You could also say, with probably as much merit, that the more people play a game, the more likely they are to leave a review... And people that like the game keep playing it, while people that don't like the game just move on.