We Built This City

Monte Cristo's Jerome Gastaldi on the launch of Cities XL, and the challenges of creating a new kind of MMOG

Feature by Phil Elliott Contributor

Published on Oct. 15, 2009

GamesIndustry.biz How far do the boxed product revenues cover initial development costs, or will you be relying on some of the subscription income to help with that?

Jerome Gastaldi

We will need to get a fair number of subscriptions to cover the initial cost, yes. The overall level of investment wouldn't be sustainable for a boxed-only product, not in the current state of the PC market.

GamesIndustry.biz Cost of development is a big issue, and this project is pretty ambitious... but on top of that is the challenge of the service model - is that something the team is looking forward to, given that the launch is only the beginning of the story.

Jerome Gastaldi

It's clear that for us it's one of the key challenges - to be able to move from a product company to a service company, because effectively that's what happens. We've had to acquire expertise that we didn't have in the company: the head of customer support is coming from outside of the industry; the head of platform is coming from one of the leaders in the MMO genre.

We have had to open ourselves up to people that could bring experience, that had been through launches before - so that they can help in changing the mentality of the company. When you're under the pressure of the community you react differently to when you're not, and more than anything it's been a management challenge, and a really interesting one.

To meet that, we brought them in really early on so they could go through the beta, and basically we tested the service-side too - so far we're pretty happy with the way it's gone.

GamesIndustry.biz The launch period seems to be the hardest part for any persistent online games - we've seen it most recently with Aion, but not even World of Warcraft was immune... so on balance you seem to have done okay...

Jerome Gastaldi

Overall we're happy with the way it's been handled - and when I say that, we are seeing volumes that are four to five times larger than those we had during the peak of beta-testing, so we're in a zone that we've not been in before.

Nevertheless it's been pretty clean - although it would have been 'perfect' if we hadn't had the bottleneck on the trading system, but what we're effectively discovering is that people who bought the game are making far more use of that trading than those in the beta.

So clearly the pattern of play - it's not the number of hours that's being played, but the pattern that's significantly different to what we noticed in the beta. But it's nothing to worry about, it just means we'll play catch-up for a while.

GamesIndustry.biz At what point do you feel you'll be past the 'post-launch' phase and into the 'ongoing development' period?

Jerome Gastaldi

I think it's impossible for us to tell - what we know from past experience of city-building games is that they're not big day one sellers. They're not games that people jump on in the first week, and you make 50 per cent in that first week. The curve is pretty stable.

So we think it's a good start, and the time ahead of us - the build-up to Christmas - should see an increase in numbers... but I don't know how much tranquillity that will give us in the next couple of months!

But that's a nice problem to have - potentially we've have to postpone some acquisition content, and we cut the access earlier this week for trial players, so we're not registering more trial players at the moment: The trial version that can be given away in the box meant that numbers were going up drastically, and we want to put the emphasis on people who have played the game first.