Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI
Worth it · Strategy · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $59.99.
- Length
- 23.4h
- Value
- $2.56/hr
- Reviews
- 86% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 1 GB & AMD 5570 or nVidia 450 or Intel Integrated Graphics 530, 17 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Expand your empire, advance your culture and go head-to-head against history’s greatest leaders. Will your civilization stand the test of time?
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $2.99. Its cuts run 85 percent off as a rule. There have been 97 in the 10 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 2 percent on value. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Sid Meier's Civilization® IV ($19.99, scores 87) beats it on value, while it beats HUMANKIND™ ($49.99, scores 20).
Steam's global achievement data says under 1 percent of players ever finish it. On a 23.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 10 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written May 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 52 percent of the 6,234 reviews written there were positive, against 86 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it.
23.4 hours to finish it, 388 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 17 times the campaign.
It came out 10 years ago and 25.4K were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
74% start to <1% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 23.4-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
25.4K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Having played and enjoyed this game for years I figured it was time for the review. With the unfortunate release of the monstrosity know as Civ Seven, I thought it necessary to recognize a proper well-made Civ game. The calamity of Civ Seven has pushed myself and several friends into the loving arms of good old Civ Six. We've been playing this title more and more. Thank the gods it exists. It might be the last good...
Civilization VI is one of those games where you can sit down for "one more turn" and suddenly lose several hours. The city-building, technology, diplomacy, and strategy systems all work together nicely, and there are tons of ways to approach each game. It can feel overwhelming at first, but once everything works, the gameplay loop is seriously addictive.
There's something strange about enemy balance. There's something odd with the source distribution: enemies always have more resources. There's something weird about developing standalone cities: they don't have any resources, but they get a military boost. Enemies can capture standalone cities even if there are no direct connections. I tried several difficulty levels and ended up dropping the game I want a...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI scores 72/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/289070/sid-meier-s-civilization-viThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.