Total War Pharaoh Steam reviews put Creative Assembly’s strategy sim at ‘mixed,’ while the TW Pharaoh player count falls below Total War Rome 2 from 2013.
Apples to oranges comparison. CA builds a lot of games under the Total War banner. Some are very big, very expensive projects (like Rome 2), others are really just a way of testing tech and training devs (like Odysseus). Pharaoh, as I understand it, falls very much into the latter category.
While the sales numbers look bad on the surface, for what it probably cost to make, I suspect CA is prefectly happy. Remember they literally gave Odysseus away for free. That's just how their release cadence works.
First of all, it's called "A Total War Saga: Troy", not Odysseus.
More importantly, the "Saga" part of the title is what CA uses to designate the smaller, more experimental projects that you're mentioning, which they explicitly did not use with Pharaoh.
Apples to oranges comparison. CA builds a lot of games under the Total War banner. Some are very big, very expensive projects (like Rome 2), others are really just a way of testing tech and training devs (like Odysseus). Pharaoh, as I understand it, falls very much into the latter category.
While the sales numbers look bad on the surface, for what it probably cost to make, I suspect CA is prefectly happy. Remember they literally gave Odysseus away for free. That's just how their release cadence works.
First of all, it's called "A Total War Saga: Troy", not Odysseus.
More importantly, the "Saga" part of the title is what CA uses to designate the smaller, more experimental projects that you're mentioning, which they explicitly did not use with Pharaoh.
Sometimes uses. They wrote the rules, they can apply them however they like.
I think this one is being looked at differently because after hyenas people are wondering if the studio is dead or not