The good and the bad of Sid Meier's Civilization series

[Omniscient]

Do you know if any good numbers exist? While PC gaming stats may be up year over year, how does that compare in raw numbers to the big 3 consoles? My gut, though I admit to not being hardcore about gaming so take that with a grain of salt, is that the big studios are going all in on consoles. Because XBox and PC games are pretty similar they get released for both, but the number of PC-only games is vanishingly small.

How much of the success of Civ VI is based on the cross-platform nature of the game?

[Miller]

Consoles are bigger if you treat them all as one market, PCs are bigger if you track console sales independently. Mobile is bigger than anything else.

PC is still the most popular platform for game developers with 56% developing games for the platform in 2020. When it comes to consoles, Sony is still managing to beat Microsoft in terms of game development focus with 25% of developers focusing on the PS4 over 23% on the Xbox One. This trend continues when we look at next-gen consoles with 11% working on PS5 games over 9% working on Xbox Series X. Despite PC gaming coming top for developers, Mobile gaming is the most popular platform for users with 48% of players now regularly engaging in mobile gaming, and console gaming outperforming PC gaming in terms of the global games market.

From this page of game market statistics.

Civ VI, specifically, sold over 5.5 million copies when this article was published in 2019, two months before the console versions released.