Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has stated that he is confident that Civilization 7 will still meet the publisher’s “lifetime value” target despite the game’s weaker commercial performance following its launch earlier this year.

The details:

Back in February, Take-Two launched Civilization 7, the latest entry in the long-running strategy franchise, across consoles and PC. However, the response from players was mixed, with many criticizing the oversimplification of gameplay mechanics and poor UI design. The weak performance of the game can be seen via SteamDB, where Civ 7 only reached half of the all-time peak player count of its predecessor and averages less than 10,000 concurrent players compared to Civ 6’s 40,000.
Despite this “slow start,” in a recent interview with IGN, Zelnick insisted that the game will still meet Take-Two’s internal projection by the end of its lifecycle. “I think the key thing is that Civ has always been a slow burn,” the CEO said. “It's always been a title that had—I'm not really a big believer in the long tail theory of the entertainment business—but Civ is an example of that theory. And right now our projections for the lifetime value of the title are very consistent with our initial expectations for the title.”
Zelnick also notes that changes are on the way and that the company feels “really good” about the game’s future. Developer Firaxis recently released update 1.2.3 in July, bringing a number of highly requested improvements, notably addressing issues with Civ 7’s controversial “Age Transitions” system, which attempts to smooth the changing of ages. The studio also shared that more major changes are on the way, but that they are "going to take time" to put together.

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Civilization 7 will meet company expectations despite "slow start," says Take-Two CEO