Firaxis Games

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Civilization VII is headed to iPhone and iPad with “Arcade Edition”

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Civilization VII is coming to the iPhone and iPad, Apple and publisher 2K announced today.

Formally titled Sid Meier’s Civilization VII Arcade Edition, it is developed by Behaviour Interactive with input from original developer Firaxis Games.

The game will be available as part of the Apple Arcade service, which offers ad-free games for Apple platforms for $7 per month. Neither announcement makes any mention of a non-Arcade version, so this appears to be exclusively part of the subscription.

That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise; full-priced premium games have struggled on the platform when not bundled in a subscription. For example, Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption came out both as a standalone title on the App Store and as part of Netflix’s subscription. The Netflix version surpassed a staggering 3.3 million downloads, while the $40 direct purchase managed just over 10,000.

The announcement calls this release “the authentic Civilization experience,” which you can probably take to mean that it doesn’t simplify the gameplay in any way. That said, there is some fine print you shouldn’t miss.

The App Store listing for the game says this release will not receive any of the DLC planned for other platforms. It also notes that “post-launch updates that apply to other platforms may be excluded or delayed.” Also, the supported players listed is “1,” suggesting it may not have multiplayer. (The desktop and console versions already lack hotseat multiplayer, but they support online play.)

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Civilization VII team at Firaxis Games faces layoffs

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However, it’s important to note that neither of those metrics gives as complete a picture as some Internet discussions suggest they do; Civilization VII launched on other platforms and game stores like the PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Game Store, and those wouldn’t be captured in Steam numbers—even though it intuitively seems likely that Steam would account for the significant majority of players for this particular franchise. Twitch viewership is also not necessarily representative of sales or the number of players.

It’s also difficult to know for sure whether the layoffs are tied to the game’s performance.

Just a month ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that while the game had a “slow start,” he believes “Civ has always been a slow burn.” He said the projections for the “lifetime value of the title” are consistent with the company’s initial projections.

There have been numerous other examples of studios and publishers laying off staff from teams that worked on both successful and unsuccessful releases as the industry continues to roll back pandemic-era over-hiring and respond to inflation, rising borrowing costs, global economic instability, trade uncertainty, ballooning development costs, and efficiency pressures.

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With 1.2.2 update, Civilization VII tries to win back traditionalists

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There’s also a new loading screen with more detailed information and more interactive elements, which Firaxis says is a hint at other major UI overhauls to come. That said, players have already complained that it doesn’t look very nice because the 2D leader assets that appear on it have been scaled awkwardly and look fuzzy.

The remaining changes are largely balance and systems-related. Trade convoys can now travel over land, which means treasure ships will no longer get stuck in lakes, and there are broader strategic options for tackling the economic path in the Exploration Age. There has been a significant effort to overhaul town focuses, including the addition of a couple new ones, and the much-anticipated nerf of the Hub Town focus; it now provides +1 influence per connected town instead of two, though that may still not be quite enough to make the Hub Town, well, not overpowered.

You can find a bunch of other small balance tweaks in the patch notes, including new city-state bonuses, pantheons, and religious beliefs, among other things.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to some, you can now issue a command to pet the scout unit’s dog.

Next steps

As far as I can tell, there are still two major traditional features fans are waiting on: autoexplore for scout units and hotseat multiplayer support. Firaxis says it’s working on both, but neither made it into 1.2.2. Players have also been asking for further UI overhauls. Firaxis says those are coming, too.

When Civilization VII launched, I wrote that I quite liked it, but I also pointed out bugs and balance changes and noted that it won’t please traditionalists. For some players, the review said it might be better to wait. We did a follow-up article about a month in, interviewing the developers. But that was still during the “fix things that are on fire stage.”

More than any previous update, today’s 1.2.2 is the first one that seems like a natural jumping-on point for people who have been taking a wait-and-see approach.

It’s quite common for strategy games like this to not really fully hit their stride until weeks or even months of updates. Civilization VII‘s UI problems made it a particularly notable example of that trend, but the good news is that it’s also following the same path as the games before it that got good post-launch support: slowly, it’s becoming a game a broader range of Civ fans can enjoy.

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