Yesterday Montecristo announced that Cities XL online mode, known as Planet Offer, will end on the 8th of March, just three months after launching. According to Montecristo, “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.”
It’s not a surprise since the Planet Offer was plagued with bugs and lag from the start, and the website wasn’t much better. I already mentioned this on a previous post and how it was causing problems even to offline gameplay. However, I was hoping they would be resolved. Instead, it seems they are not profitable enough so they are closing shop after just 3 months.
Theoretically the game will become a full single player, offline game after they patch it. At the very least, this means that the game will stop connecting to the unstable Montecristo servers and insisting on the benefits of the Planet Offer paid subscription, which can only be good. However, unless the game changes to be made more complex I doubt it can pull it against the likes of Simcity.
Still, it’s a pity that such a great idea has failed. Online mode was one of the things that attracted me to this game and building a city that can interact with other human players cities was fun and innovative. Sadly, the implementation wasn’t so good.
What are your thoughts on that? Is Montecristo giving up too quick? Should they just try lowering the price, or taking alternative measures to keep the online mode alive? Or are you glad the Planet Offer is no more and you can play without connecting to the Internet?
