We Built This City

[smiles] Well, at the time I wasn't talking b*llocks, I would have sworn on it. But we pushed ourselves to get into beta in April, so pretty early, because as a company we were at the stage where we were having internal differences of opinion, with no metrics to evaluate them.

So we launched the beta because we needed to have feedback from potential users, and from that we were forced to make some drastic changes - not on the game itself, but more on the interface and trading system. We went back to the drawing board on those two aspects and adjusted them a lot in the past four months.

What we had thought was an almost finished game in January, wasn't...

Well, with the user interface, when you zoom down you can see the statistics of the planet, and you can see three or four figures where players are clearly blocking - they can't develop any further. You lose a lot of those players, let's say 75,000 inhabitants, and you have to ask why, and why there's a problem.

When you've done a bit of digging you start to understand why, and with the interface there was some information not being given to the players, so that has been pretty useful.

The second element was that we were really being pushed for a trading system that was a lot more oriented towards the market place, rather than one-to-one. People wanted a level of reactivity that we didn't design to begin with.

It's an expensive part of the year - what you can buy in advertising at this time of year is drastically lower than what you could buy at the beginning of September. To that extent it's a challenge, but we still believe that with the activity we'd had early on, it was worthwhile to release this side of Christmas.

The marketing has to be ongoing, yes. I think we've dedicated around 50 per cent of our overall marketing spend so far, and the rest of it will go on opportunities around Christmas activities. We think Cities XL is a typical gift game.

I think for retail sales we'll wait until Christmas, because it's not the kind of game you need to have right away - it has to have a bit of time to settle down. In terms of the overall business model I think we'll have to wait on subscriptions.

We're not forcing people to subscribe after the trail period - but we do expect some of them to. We've got around 7-8 per cent of those people who bought the game who have subscribed before the end of the trial period.

But we don't know what value to give to that over time. In a month's time we'll have an indication, but we also think that a certain number of players will go through the solo mode, get bored with it, and then want to see what's happening online. For those guys, how long will it take them? We don't know. We'll have to be a little bit patient.