Was a Civilization VII even needed?

[ParabolaWaVe]

The people here in the forum, who like the game, actually make a good point when they say that we, the skeptics on Civ VII would do better in going back to the (superior) classics and leave them alone. Well thought, it turns out this is actually not a bad idea... not only in the case of this game or developer, but in general. We'd do better by going away, and show the middle finger to this greedy, even disrespectful game industry as we leave.

Software is so easy and so cheap to duplicate today... specially now with digital distribution platforms such as Steam. That's a factor to consider, regarding how much they're cheating us. There's no DVD, CD or anything physical to pay for anymore, so companies have very low distribution costs and they manage this task with almost no middleman... they don't even print manuals or paper boxes anymore. In part, this low effort duplication explains that there's an extremely high supply of games, in fact the market is flooded. So many titles have been released in the last few years, that is now impossible for a single human being to play them all in their lifetime. That means though, that you can pretty much build yourself a collection for a decade of gameplay exclusively from older games, for just the price of 5 recent AAA titles; provided you spend it wisely and take advantage of discounts.

Only reason old folks like me still paid for new games, is because the industry had promised to build and deliver better stuff as tech gets better. That is no longer the case; they've broken that promise, and now they're consistently making either unremarkable original stuff, or new installments in classic franchises such as this, which are vastly worse than what came before. And, instead of getting their act together after they release these lemons, missing critical and financial expectations, they repackage old, already released stuff in the form of remakes or remasters, trying to sell us once again what we already purchased in order to recoup losses.

So the Civ VII fans are actually right about this, as consumers we should wise up and reconsider why we stay with them and pay them money that they no longer deserve. Because in practice, we're paying to downgrade our software, not to upgrade it. Why should we consider giving out more of our hard earned money to these companies, when clearly they hardly put any effort into it anymore?

Steam player numbers don't lie; lots of people paid for Civ VII, yet the majority is still playing the older games instead. We can do that for free.

[z3rk]

In short, i'd say like this.
It would have been needed if the developers had something concrete in mind and just wanted to share their passion with others. That;s why i think the future is with Indie games, they are passionate, they want to create and share what they've made and not make 10 different research what 'audience would like and how to profit from it' like AAA do.

However instead they, so it seems, focused on another milking machine that,in their mind was going to provide them a steady flow of money, just like the second half of Civ 6 did. And the quality and the rest were to follow, more like a byproduct of the milking process. "you want good stuff? here take these scraps and ♥♥♥♥ off"

And they failed, again, so it seems, because people playing games, especially such games, are not 'obedient consumers' that roll when they're told to.

[ParabolaWaVe]

Yes, I share the faith in the indie industry. New AAA studios will start coming from there at some point.

If the current leaders of this market want to survive, they need to shift focus from quantity to quality. Unlike what happens in the film industry, you can replay old games as many times you want and have fun with them, so they can't just release garbage after garbage while thinking this strategy holds in the long term.

That's the problem with them. The big bucks gaming publishers still don't get that they need to be able to compete, not just against other publishers, but also against older (and usually better) versions of themselves.