Cities XL shuts down MMO component

By Oli Welsh Published 28 January, 2010

Lack of interest blamed; sequel planned.

Monte Cristo has decided to suspend the Planet Offer of Cities XL - the massively multiplayer, subscription-charging mode of the city-building game - because it didn't attract enough players.

The Planet Offer's online servers will be closed on March 8th 2010, Monte Cristo announced on the game's website. The developer will stop accepting new subscriptions next Monday, 1st February. Instead, it will focus its energies on a new version of the single-player game called Cities XL 2011.

"Trying something new always comes with a risk," the studio said in its statement. "Three months after the launch we have to admit that the subscription rate is lower than what we expected and therefore the Planet Offer is no longer sustainable. Not enough players decided to subscribe.

"We do realise that some of you were real fans of the Planet Offer, and loved to be able to visit other player's cities and trade tokens between each other. There are simply not enough of us," it lamented.

Instead of continuing online development, Cities XL "will evolve into a fully single player game". The FAQ explains that some existing Planet Offer features such as the bus will be added to the current single-player game for free; others, like Megastructures, will be "spread through multiple paid content packs"; meanwhile, entirely new features will be held back for the release of Cities XL 2011.

"The packs as well as Cities XL 2011 will be released simultaneously on our site as digital downloads," Monte Cristo said. "Their exact content and their prices will be announced in the next few weeks. We intend to keep the prices very reasonable."

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (11) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Eraysor #1 2 years ago

    I never expected it to do well. It was far too expensive for what you got, and put me off buying the game completely.

  • ChaK #2 2 years ago

    same here, but maybe a full single player new version might get me interested

  • X201 #3 2 years ago

    It was one of those games that I would always nearly buy but never quite get around to.

    The online component actually turned me away from it. The dash for online has reached stupid levels with every game having to bow down to the publishers demands of " It must have an online component or it won't sell, online is what sells these days and keeps revenue streams open".

    I just wanted a single player city building game that was more up to date than the last version of Sim City, that I could play and drop whenever I wanted.

  • Lusterpurge #4 2 years ago

    I just want a new Sim City game in the vein of Sim City 2000 and 3000.

  • ignatiusjreilly #5 2 years ago

    Shame, because it was actually a pretty good game, but it was never an MMO no matter how they tried to convince you. It seemed like a single-player game with the online portion crudely inserted, and a 7€ monthly subscription was clearly poor value for money for everyone but the hardest of hardcore fans.

  • 4thVariety #6 2 years ago

    What sort of marketing BS is this?
    Trying something new always comes with a risk

    No, remaking an old game and charging monthly for continued play comes with a risk. Sim City is a tough sale and no million seller even before you strap a subscription to it.

  • TASTYRYAN #7 2 years ago

    Tried it for a month, had a lot of potential but it was far from finished. Broken infrastructre and a very lame trading system that wasnt balanced at all.

    Doesnt come at a surprise. Simcity 4 is still the better City builder. And will remain so for a long time to come.

  • Murton #8 2 years ago

    If they really want to drum up interest then they need to make it a single player game but with some great community features. I remember back in the Sim City 4 days stumbling across a community of gamers that devised a way to make Sim City 4 multiplayer-ish by uploading their cities to the site and then having someone import them all into the same map and re-releasing an updated map with everyone else's city on it. This lead to sim-people moving between cities using the infrastructure that players built, a little competition to see who could make the biggest and best cities, it was pretty much a community version of what cities XL tried to do. If they release the sequel with similar, free features then they'll stimulate much more interest in the title and can use DLC to shore up their post sale revenue a little rather than using a subscription fee that with this particular game is very difficult to justify as a consumer.

  • IneptPercy #9 2 years ago

    I remember reading the reviews for this, looked great, monthly subs...... what the helll, NO!

    Single player version sound great.

  • ZeroAX #10 2 years ago

    @Eraysor same here. but this is even worse. they are giving the middle finger to those few who payed up (I think there was a lifetime offer). how expensive would it be to host a single server for those few guys?

  • the_mtfr #11 2 years ago

    I'm sad for them as I like Monte Cristo's building games' ideas throughout time, but I have the feeling what killed them was the pricing scheme. And with their announcements of various payable packs and payable super-pack they're definitely putting me away.

    I am turned on by free packs. When Epic announced the huge and free Titan Pack for UT3, I immediately bought UT3.

    Free packs enlarge user base and give a bonus to the developers' public image. Payable packs just milk the existing user base.