Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick wants the blame to rest on him for the struggles and failures of Civilization 7.
Released in February 2025, the latest installment in the 35-year-old strategy franchise featured a bold shift for the game. Gone was the traditional element of choosing a civilization and playing with it for the duration of the game. Now, players change their civilization as the game progresses via “ages”.
It didn’t go over well with fans, and the game still hasn’t fully recovered. As of writing, Civilization 7 still has mixed reviews on Steam, with an even 50% split between positive and negative. In terms of players, Civilization 7 averages a peak of about 6,000 concurrent players per day. That’s less than both Civilization 5 (~16,000) and Civilization 6 (~38,000).
Zelnick admits that the company “got it wrong” with the latest game.
“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?’ And we got it wrong with Civ VII, but it wasn’t for want of trying. And again, I take responsibility for it,” Zelnick told Game File’s Stephen Totilo.
“So we’ve made a bunch of fixes. We’ll continue to make fixes. The game is a really good game. 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.”
Seven months after the game’s release, developer Firaxis Games held layoffs that Take-Two said were done “as the studio restructures and optimizes its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity.”
Whether these optimizations and game fixes are enough to bring back players who have chosen to stay with games over a decade old remains to be seen. But it just might be time to admit defeat and start planning out what’s next for the series.
What do you think about where Civilization 7 sits and where it’s come from since release? Leave your thoughts down in the comments and in the official Insider Gaming Discord.
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Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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So he’ll take a pay cut? Or get fired? These people are all talk execs, celebrities, influencers, and of course politicians it’s all the ssme hypocrite virtue signal bs. They believe none of it.