Cities XL

Monte Cristo Multimedia was founded in Paris in 1995 by Jean-Marc de Fety, a former vice-president at Credit Suisse First Boston, and Jean-Christophe Marquis, previously a senior consultant at Mars & Co. The company’s early output ran toward business simulations, including the Wall Street Trader series, which the European Commission recognised as best educational software for its stock market modelling. By the mid-2000s, with Jérôme Gastaldi leading alongside Marquis, the studio had pivoted toward PC games with broader appeal. City Life, released in May 2006, was the result: a full-3D city-builder that required players to balance six distinct socioeconomic groups within their city, and one of the first construction and management games to render its environments in a fully navigable three-dimensional engine. Cities XL, released on 8 October 2009, was the follow-up, and it was considerably more ambitious.

The game had originally been announced under the title Cities Unlimited. At launch it shipped in two modes. Solo play offered approximately 500 buildings, 25 maps ranging from coastal plains to mountainous terrain, a zoning system covering residential, commercial, and industrial areas at four density levels, and a resource economy where cities produced and consumed fuel, food, and manufactured goods. Residential demand was divided across four social classes, unskilled workers through elites, each with different needs for services, employment, price levels, and traffic tolerance. Managing the gap between what a city produced and what its population required was the central pressure of the game, and players could address shortfalls by specialising in particular industries and trading surpluses with other cities.

The second mode was Planet Offer, and it was where Monte Cristo had placed their larger bet. Planet Offer was an MMO-style persistent environment in which players built cities on shared virtual planets, traded resources directly with other players rather than through an AI intermediary, collaborated to construct megastructures such as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, visited one another’s cities through an in-game avatar, and participated in community events. Access required a monthly subscription, priced at approximately $9.25, on top of the base game purchase. The most detailed features, including the broadest map selection and the most significant building content, were reserved for Planet Offer subscribers. The underlying logic was that subscription revenue would fund ongoing development and server infrastructure, transforming a city-builder into a living, expanding service.

The subscription numbers never came. On 27 January 2010, less than four months after release, Monte Cristo announced that Planet Offer would close. The servers went dark on 8 March 2010. A patch released the same day unlocked the bus transport system, previously a Planet Offer exclusive, for solo play. Monte Cristo announced work on Cities XL 2011, a fully single-player rebuild incorporating the features that had been locked behind the subscription. They did not finish it. The studio declared bankruptcy in May 2010, citing the financial consequences of Cities XL’s underperformance and the costs of maintaining its online infrastructure.

Focus Home Interactive acquired the Cities XL franchise in June 2010 and completed the conversion, releasing Cities XL 2011 in October of that year. The rebuilt game folded Planet Offer’s trading mechanics into a system where players managed a network of their own cities on a planet rather than interacting with strangers, a smaller but more stable vision of the same idea. Cities XL 2012 followed as an expansion, Cities XL Platinum in February 2013, and Cities XXL in February 2015, each adding maps, buildings, and incremental engine improvements. The series never resolved the performance issues that had constrained the original release, and it never recovered its commercial footing.

The failure of Planet Offer was not primarily a failure of the idea. The structural problem was the pricing model: asking players to pay a subscription for a feature that should have been the base game, at a time when the subscription model outside of dedicated MMOs carried enormous resistance, produced exactly the limited uptake Monte Cristo described when they announced the closure. Cities XL demonstrated that the mechanical foundation for interconnected city-building at scale was achievable. It also demonstrated that a studio of roughly 70 people could not absorb the infrastructure cost of running persistent online worlds on the revenue generated by a niche city-building audience. Cities: Skylines, which arrived in 2015 from Colossal Order and sold over a million copies in its first month, is routinely cited as the game that delivered what Cities XL had attempted. It did so as a single-player title with mod support, with the online ambition stripped away entirely.