Clearly a caveat needs to be extended immediately, here: Sid Meier’s Civilization games, at least with the sixth installment, are about as popular as any 4X game could hope to be in this day and age. With regards to a spare thought for Civ VI, the title of this article might make one wonder what a mainstream audience could even look like for 4X games. If not the 11 million copies sold for VI, then what?
A mainstream audience, in this case, isn’t a hamstrung term for “audience, but more“. It means exactly what it purports to mean: the audience that enjoys mainstream titles: Battle Royals, Call of Duty, WoW, League of Legends, Apex Legends, etcetera, miscellanea.
Civilization has always appealed to a tightly-knit group of gamers that consists of history buffs, war-tactic enthusiasts, art enjoyers, and deity-level chads who love hyper-optimizing their gameplay. While this crowd is strong in number for the genre to be considered top-tier among its peers, it isn’t strong enough to call the player base up towards the top of the Twitch charts, for example.
And this is where Civ 7 steps in. The game shall inherit the large player base of Civ 6, the initial release will be met with more anticipation than any 4X game to come before it, and these two factors will cause a huge swelling of news articles, let’s plays, and streamer participation that will, keen-like, appeal to the wider audience that is young gamers.
It isn’t solid theory as to what sort of gameplay changes will be made in Civ 7, but if the game can retain its strategic depth while making the late game a little more involved, it’s possible that Civilization 7 will be the Civilization that pulls 4X games into the hearts and minds of the younger generations and, subsequently, creates the pathway for another 30 years of Gandhi threatening everyone and their mother with nuclear annihilation.
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