We have been for six months since the disturbing launch of Civilization 7, which has fewer players on Steam than both civilization 6 and 15-year-old civilization 5
Civization 7 had a arduous premiere of Steam and fought for players on the Valve platform since its premiere in February. The reaction is “mixed”, according to the reviews of Steam users. Of course, the performance of the CIV 7 steam does not paint the whole image. The strategic game was also launched on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch (Nintendo Switch 2 version and the VR version also recently launched). But bread and butter of civilization are PC, and there CIV 7 clearly fights.
In an interview with IGN, in order to discuss extremely positive financial results Take-DWO in the last quarter of 2025, CEO Strauss Zelnick admitted that CIV 7 began “slow start”, but insisted that the company’s internal forecasts for what he called the “value of life” from CIV 7 would still match their preliminary expectations.
“It definitely improves,” said Zelnick about CIV 7 (Take-Two has not yet announced the sale of the game).
“I think that the most important thing is that CIV has always been a slow burns. It has always been a title – I am not a great believing in the theory of a long tail of an entertainment company – but CIV is an example of this theory. And now our projections for the whole life of the title are very consistent with our initial expectations of the title.
“So when we were slowly and although we had to make changes – and there are more changes – it seems to me that consumers are getting better and we feel really good with the title. I think that in time it will take this place in his pantheon of civilization in a very successful, credible way.”
Ranking every civilization game
Ranking every civilization game
After starting CIV 7, players emphasized the problems with the user interface, the lack of variety of maps and expressed the impression that the game started without many functions they expected from the franchise. But some experienced CIV fans did not do well with the dramatic Firaxis programmer in the game.
A full campaign in civilization 7 is one that has been going through all three centuries: antiquity, exploration and modernity. After the end of the century, all players (and all opponents of AI) experience the passage of age at the same time. During the passage of age, three things happen: you choose a new civilization from New Age to represent your empire, you choose which legacy you want to keep in a new era, and the world of games is evolving.
Civilization games never had such a system and proved to be dividing. But Firaxis has launched a number of key updates to CIV 7 since launching, recently patch 1.2.3, which improved the age of age.
The question is: Can Firaxis transform the civilization of 7 sentiments from the current “mixed” assessment of user review on Steam and encourage more people to jump from previous CIV games to recent efforts?
Wesley is a director, news in IGN. Find it on Twitter on @św100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpole@ign.com or confidentially at spine@proton.me.
