Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[MJW (ya that one)]

Except that it was hugely successful with general audiences.

I think if we're going with a highschool metaphor, RB likes to complain at its lunch table about the one massively popular kid that it thinks nobody realizes is a big phony.

Well if this site, is right on the hours you've got 28.7m hours played for c. 9m copies (from this site) of the game sold. Therefore you've got an average of three hours played per owner. Now we've probably lost a number of million hours to those who play the game in offline mode, but I wouldn't be surprised if the hours logged on steam are around 70% of total hours played (if not higher), which still gives only 4.2 hours played per copy bought.

So how many people bought the game (or had it bought for them) and either never played the game or quickly shelved it? That's a very large chunk of the 9m purchasers that 2K/Firaxis have little chance of getting back, except maybe at big discount sales.

Edit: to come back to the Football Manager comparison I use a lot when talking about the "success" of Civ 5 the currrent iteration of that game (FM2016) has 1/9 of the ownership base yet has logged just slightly over 2m less hours or recorded game time as Civ 5. If you run the average play time per copy bought you get over 25 hours per copy of the game, which is not too far off how long I take when playing an SP game of Civ 4 to completion, and what I'd generally expect to see as a minimum for if a substantial number of the community is playing regularly.

Civ5 is still #4 on Steam...It's pretty obvious you don't want to admit that a crappy game could be successful. Most people never make it to even Emperor and civ5 is perfectly fine below that. (And no--you playing below that doesn't count: if you think the game is slow and boring you could beat Emperor.)

Civ6 will be successful because it's the only AAA TBS left but that isn't saying much. $60 isn't a lot if it's just one game.

[antisocialmunky]

Well $60 for CVI its nearly the same as the $50 that CIV in 2005 was :\
http://www.in2013dollars.com/2005-dollar...ount=49.99

[Sirian]

Well if this site, is right on the hours you've got 28.7m hours played for c. 9m copies (from this site) of the game sold.

Wow. (Not wow at what you said, but at the apparent error in it.)

That 28.7m hours is just for the 34k folks who were actively playing, I believe. That's not 3h per copy, but almost 1000h per active player.

Kind of takes the wind out of what you seemed to be saying there?


Like it or not, there *is* a substantially-sized casual audience for whom Civ5 is pure ambrosia. They can just keep playing more and more of it without end, and enjoying the games. The number of players who have played 1000+ hours of Civ5 is larger than the total audience for most games. And to many game makers, those players; tastes count as much as ours, and there are more of them than there are of us.

The sad part of that is that AAA publishers have gotten the message: appealing to a wider, more casual audience feeds profit margins. Good luck getting a game like Civ4 ever again out of a AAA developer.

Luckily for consumers, digital distribution has re-energized game-making by smaller teams, teams as small as those that made the games we love (most of us?) from the 90s. Some of these teams are free to make games the way they want, rather than always having to follow the Civ5 "Go Casual!" formula. Indie developers are where to find designs that appeal to old school gamers.


- Sirian

[GermanJoey]

Well if this site, is right on the hours you've got 28.7m hours played for c. 9m copies (from this site) of the game sold.

Wow. (Not wow at what you said, but at the apparent error in it.)

That 28.7m hours is just for the 34k folks who were actively playing, I believe. That's not 3h per copy, but almost 1000h per active player.

No, it's total hours played for all players who have ever played the game, for all time. So 3h/player is the correct number. What the "current players" column in that link measures is the number of players that are playing at the same time right now. It's more relevant to multiplayer-only stuff like DotA, where the more people connected to the server correlates to an easier/faster time finding a match, as the matchmaking algorithm needs to find 10 players that satisfy a particular condition. (e.g. a specific combination of skill level, game mode, party size, etc) Likewise, "peak players" is just the highest "current players" number for all time.

[Rowain]

If you move over the green chart you see that on Aug 13 2016 Civ 5 has 1.1 mio hours played. On Aug 15th it has 980k and so on.

So I doubt the 28 mio are for all players that have ever played.

[Rowain]

If you lok deeper into the steam stats you see that Civ 5 has constantly 30k to 40k players per hour on.
During the last 24 hours the peak was more than 50k people playing Civ5 during the same hour.

[GermanJoey]

Perhaps its total hours played in the last month, then? If Civ5 is averaging ~900k hours per day, then that's reasonably ballpark for a ~28M number for the last month.

edit: but that would mean the *average* player here is playing ~900k/~50k = 14h/day of Civ5? That can't be right...

[Krill]

How many people just leave civ running in the back ground, and more importantly, just how many of them only play SP?

Whichever way you dice it, MP is never going to get hte resources it needs.

[Lord Parkin]

Civ5 is still #4 on Steam...It's pretty obvious you don't want to admit that a crappy game could be successful.

Crappy? Let's not get carried away, Civ5 in its current state is objectively a pretty decent game. If you're solely comparing it to Civ4, then sure there are a number of things lacking... but that's an incredibly high bar you're up against. If you view any game without as much depth and nuance as Civ4 is "crappy", then you're not going to enjoy pretty much any other game out there.

[HansLemurson]

Except that it was hugely successful with general audiences.

I think if we're going with a highschool metaphor, RB likes to complain at its lunch table about the one massively popular kid that it thinks nobody realizes is a big phony.