Console RTS: Civilization Revolution Is Off and Running

The worst thing about playing a real time strategy game is that you lose track of time. It is possible to sit in one posture for so long that you do not realize what you’re doing to yourself until you realize you are permanently crippled. Actually, the first indicator isn’t your mouse hand cramped into a death claw, or your dried out eyeballs, or even the rosy fingers of dawn creeping through the window at a point in time when you were thinking you should get some supper. It’s your numb, bloodless butt that has been planted in one spot for more hours than is strictly natural.

Clearly the solution is a softer seat. Like your couch. And it looks like in all the sound and fury over MMOs on the console and FPS on the computer, the real crossover is taking root. It may be too early to call it a movement, but we here at GamerDNA are going to stand up and call it a trend.

Civilization is one of the all time great franchises, and Civ4 was an enormous success right out of the gate. Despite an October 2005 release, it still shows up on the list of the top fifty PC games being played by GamerDNA members every day (usually in the thirties). Strategy games in general run third to MMOs and FPS titles in terms of being played every day:

Strategy has 13% of the total. But that statistic is a little misleading. As I pointed out in my introduction, strategy players are almost as devoted as MMO players in terms of time spent plunked in front of the screen:

As you can see, ALL of the strategy titles are at the weighty end of the chart. MMOs, of course, often have higher numbers of minutes per day, and I’ve left them off this chart in the interests of readability – for example, World of Warcraft players average 250 minutes per session. Yes. Civ players enjoy their brand of fun for two and a half hours at a time, but WoW players log an AVERAGE of over four hours every time they play. This number applies to most MMOs in my experience, incidentally.

Two and a half hours is still a mind boggling amount of time. Most movie theaters won’t even book a film that long, citing audience restlessness (and an inability to run enough showings to be cost effective, but never mind that). But I digress.

The degree to which console players log in to RTS games is still much smaller than on the PC:

As you can see, a much smaller slice of the pie – 3% versus 13%. But this could well be a function of having fewer options, and a reflection on interface design being slow to transition from PC to console in the niche. Also, consoles have certain categories that the PC does not – music, for one. It’s hard to imagine a PC version of Rock Band, or Karaoke. Or fighting. I mean, Street Fighter just isn’t the same without the controller waving and the screaming. But yet again, I digress.

A demo of Civilization Revolution was released in early June for the Xbox and the Playstation, and the game has been in full release in North America for just under a month. By all accounts, the development team got the interface issue handled. In fact, they did such a great job that the 3% pie wedge up there is almost entirely due to CivRev.

And early results show promise. CivRev players are highly engaged – a cross section of players have already spent more time on this title than 2/3rds of their collection of Xbox games as whole. Furthermore, early charts are showing the same kind of initial results as Command and Conquer 3, but with higher rates of new users and a slower dropoff. It’s only been a month, mind you, but that’s got to be good news for Firaxis.

Not just Firaxis, but the entire console gaming community. The more that different games outside the shooter genre can demonstrate an ability to rake in the cash, the more options will be available for console players, and that in turn will widen the appeal of consoles beyond the dominant market demographic of young males. And then maybe we can all band together and laugh Jack Thompson straight into obscurity.