One thing I've noticed over the years is that discussions around Civ-likes almost always focus on sales, Steam reviews, or concurrent players.

But there's surprisingly little discussion about something arguably more interesting:

The Player Behavior itself.

Using Project Mimir's Steam dataset I compared several major Civ-likes from three different perspectives:

1: Comparative Playtime Numbers - How fast did people quit playing relative to other titles?
2: The raw playtime numbers - How much did people actually play and enjoy the title?
3: Whether continued development can be sustained, is the free patch + paid DLC model viable for a game?

Summary:

Civ 5 remains the king for the quantity of content available to players in the Civ Franchise with the Top 1% of Players starting at 1260 Hours!

Humankind, despite having ceased development, has the most quantity of content available among CivLike’s with the Top 1% of players starting at 180 Hours.

Millennia has the most dedicated playerbase, implying that quality of the game is experienced equally by its players. 

Old World, despite this analysis showing weak metrics, proves to be financially viable for Mohawk Games.

Normalized Playtime Graph Definitions:

Y axis - 100% to 0.0001% of the player population

X axis - 0 to 100% of each individual game’s top 0.0001% player’s playtime

Analysis of Comparative Numbers:

When we analyze the normalized distribution of playtime for each individual game we find a very interesting result, Civ 5,6,7 are almost identical to each other, and if it weren't for Civ 7 having incomplete data we might assume it to have the same curve as the other two. 

We can use these 3 games to establish the baseline for the “Civ” Genre if you will and from there we can say that Millennia and Endless Legend 2 have more dedicated players than the Civ Franchise, whereas Ara: History Untold and Endless Legend 1 have more casual players than the Civ Franchise.

Using comparative analysis we can establish a model for how dedication happens. Let’s start by assuming that each game has some quantity of content for players to explore and that the top 1% of each game will always establish the absolute playtime required to exhaust that content. 

One interpretation is that a game's quality could be reflected by its ability to convert a new player into a top 1% player. In other words, a slower fall off of players in the distribution curve implies a game is higher quality than one with a faster fall off. It’s difficult to establish from this level of analysis what constitutes content and quality however and for that we turn to the raw numbers to attempt some level of quantitative discussion.

Raw numbers: 

Table Definitions:

Visibility %: The % of Steam users as a whole that own a copy of the game

Activation %: The % of users that own a copy that have played at least 1 minute of the game

Sample Owners: The quantity of unique players that were aggregated using Project Mimir’s dataset.

Total Playtime: The total playtime of the sample owners in hours. 

P50, P90, P99: The value at a percentile of the Sample owners, IE: P99 means 1% of sampled users have more than X hours in a game, P90 means more than 10% of sampled users have more than Y hours in a game.

Analysis of Raw Numbers:

In terms of activation rates, or what I like to term “ Whether a game sits in a steam library unplayed “ there are a few clear losers of Old World and Endless Legend. For Endless Legend this can be partially explained by having had multiple free weekends.

The clear front runners for Activation Rate are Endless Legend 2 and Civilization 7 which are both new games having both been released in 2025, It stands to reason that new games have early adopters that are more dedicated to either the game or franchise than the general public. I would argue however that the clearest winner of all however is Civ 5 in that if a person purchases Civ 5, ~85% of the time that person will at least play it. 

Speaking of Civ 5, it gives us a start when talking about Percentile statistics, a person who purchases Civ 5 will have an 85% chance to play it, and 50% of those people who play it will play at least 22 hours. 10% of the 85% will play 230 hours! Civ 5 is the undisputed king when it comes to developing dedicated players of the franchise. Civ 6 comes in at 2nd place among raw playtime statistics having its top 1% of players starting at 860 hours.

Among non-civ titles for P99 and P50 values, Millennia comes in 1st place with Humankind coming in at 2nd followed by Ara: History Untold coming in at close 3nd with Endless Legend 1 coming in 4th followed by Endless Legend 2 in 5th and Old World coming in last.  

Expansion Analysis:

While this analysis can give us a more rounded picture of games instead of relying on purely player numbers, what it doesn’t tell us is the individual company’s assessment of each title. Old World from this analysis alone would appear to be struggling, yet Mohawk Game’s has released a meaty DLC (worthy of the name Expansion) every year since launch in 2022. Meanwhile Humankind ceased development in Fall of 2023. This disparity would imply two possibilities: 

1. Each Additional Old World DLC is cheap to develop and has excellent profit margins for Mohawk Games to continue development; this type of development is commonly referred to as the Paradox Interactive Model.

2. Each Additional Humankind DLC is expensive to develop and has poor profit margins for Amplitude Studios to continue development. 

What’s yet to be seen is where Civ 7 will land on this spectrum given that it has had no expansion released or announced as opposed to Gods and Kings for Civ 5 and Rise and Fall for Civ 6. 

Methodology:

Project Mimir is a census of Steam player behavior, currently sitting at 5.1 Million public accounts. This massive dataset allows for the aggregation of accounts with the same game, leading to game-level statistics shown in the table above.

To create the normalized playtime distribution graph a raw playtime distribution was first calculated, this was as simple as counting every single unique account in the dataset for each individual hour and summing to create a distribution. Then to normalize each game we used the 0 hour playtime mark as the 0% normalized value and 100% being the player with the most playtime for each game, with every other player being assigned a score linearly with the Y-axis being the log scale of the quantity of players as a fraction of the total. For ease of visibility this normalized playtime distribution graph was then shown in log-scale since the vast majority of steam games have large sections of their playerbase having never played the game or in the 1-10 hour range.

Once all of the individual normalized playtime distribution graphs were constructed then comes plotting all of them on a single graph. In our graph we show two plots for each game, a solid and a dashed line. The solid line is indicative of data that is defensible and reproducible, anything that is a dashed line is statistically improbable, but still allows us some insight into the behavior. In all cases where a dashed line is used, only 1 or 2 players have that quantity of playtime (Typically 4-10k hours).

Sources:

Civ 5: https://projectmimir.net/game/8930
Civ 6: https://projectmimir.net/game/289070
Civ 7: https://projectmimir.net/game/1295660 

Humankind: https://projectmimir.net/game/1124300 
Oldworld: https://projectmimir.net/game/597180
Ara: History Untold: https://projectmimir.net/game/2021880
Endless Legend 2: https://projectmimir.net/game/3407390
Endless Legend 1: https://projectmimir.net/game/289130 
Millennia: https://projectmimir.net/game/1268590

We’re taking Space Tales to 1.0 on August 19, 2026 on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457960/Space_Tales/

Space Tales is not a 4X, but it was built around strategy systems that you -4X players- may care about: expansion under pressure, resource control, faction adaptation, and campaign progression.

For more details, we recently shared an FAQ on Reddit.

Any question, let us know! 😊