Civ 5 Still Crushes Civ 7 on Steam, CEO Admits Failure

5,430 players. That's how many people were playing Civilization 7 on Steam at the time of writing, according to figures cited by multiple outlets. Civilization 6, a game that launched in 2016, had 25,518. Civilization 5, which came out in 2010, had 14,415. A fifteen-month-old sequel being tripled by its predecessor and nearly tripled again by the game before that is not a normal for any franchise, let alone one as historically dominant as Civilization.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick knows the numbers are ugly. In an interview with Game File's Stephen Totilo, Zelnick took direct responsibility for Civilization 7's struggles, saying the team "got it wrong" with the game's most divisive design decision.

"Every time there's a new Civ, the team at Firaxis thinks about: 'How do we push the envelope far enough that it makes sense to buy this new game? And how do we preserve what people love enough so that they're not disaffected?'" Zelnick told Totilo. "And we got it wrong with Civ VII, but it wasn't for want of trying. And again, I take responsibility for it."

The feature in question is the Ages system, which forces players to swap civilizations twice during a campaign. It was a radical departure from every previous Civ game, where you'd pick Rome or Egypt or whoever and ride them from the ancient era through to a space victory. The idea was to keep each era feeling fresh. In practice, it made players feel like their progress was being yanked away from them. The game currently sits at 47% positive on Steam user reviews and holds an unfavourable user score on Metacritic.

The Numbers Don't Lie

What makes this particularly embarrassing for Take-Two is that Civ 7 isn't just losing to some surprise competitor. It's losing to itself. Civ 5 is a game old enough to be in high school. Civ 6 has been fully playable and feature-complete for years. Both are cheaper, both have massive mod communities, and both let you play as one civilization from start to finish without the game ripping your empire out of your hands every few hours. I'm not surprised players stuck with what they knew. The Ages system asked for a level of trust that Firaxis hadn't earned yet, and the rest of the game wasn't strong enough to compensate.

Zelnick did stress that Civilization 7 is still "a profitable enterprise" for Take-Two, which is at least good news for Firaxis as a studio. After Midnight Suns underperformed commercially, there were real questions about whether the developer was in trouble. Profitability buys time, even if the player counts are grim.

"The game is a really good game," Zelnick said. "And it's certainly a profitable enterprise for us. But this is one where I think what we tried to do was a bridge too far, from the consumer's perspective."

I'll give Zelnick credit for saying the quiet part out loud. Most CEOs in his position would lean on the Metacritic critic score, point to profitability, and move on. Calling your own flagship strategy release "a bridge too far" in a press interview is unusually blunt for someone at that level.

Test of Time

Firaxis isn't just acknowledging the problem; it's trying to fix it. A major update called Test of Time is scheduled for May 19, and its headline feature is exactly what players have been demanding since launch: the option to play an entire campaign as a single civilization, the way every previous Civ game worked. The update will also rework the Victories system, which has been another persistent complaint.

Whether that's enough to claw back the playerbase is a different matter. Civ 6 recovered from a rough launch over the course of several years and two expansion packs, eventually becoming one of the best-regarded entries in the series. Civ 7 could follow a similar path, but it's starting from a much deeper hole. A 47% Steam rating is brutal, and first impressions in the strategy genre tend to calcify. Players who bounced off the Ages system in February 2025 aren't necessarily checking back every month to see if things have improved.

The fact that Firaxis is essentially making the Ages system optional rather than removing it entirely feels like the right call. Some players did enjoy the civilization-swapping mechanic, and preserving it as a mode rather than killing it outright respects that minority without forcing it on everyone else. But the studio is now in the position of rebuilding a game around the feature it was originally designed to showcase, and that's a much harder problem than tweaking balance numbers or adding content. If Test of Time lands well, Civ 7 might have a second life. If it doesn't, those Civ 5 and Civ 6 player counts are only going to look more damning with every passing month.