MC Withdraw 3 month subscription

[mr cars 1]

People are saying that MC are outta money. If they were then they wouldn't have released a christmas pack to ALL players and we would be seeing stuff about MC losing money on the news.

[John-SJ 13]

This is off-topic, I know, but I have a question.

We can see how the PO is doing just by looking at the number of cities on each server, and has the number of servers increased since release?

For instance, I played my 7-day free trial a couple of weeks after release. At the time there were 2 U.S. servers with between 5-6 thousand cities on each server.

So, how many U.S. servers are there now? And how many cities total?

And yes, I am aware that multiple cities per account are allowed, but still, the number of total cities should give at least a rough idea how well CXL is doing.

[zwr100 2]

I signed up for PO a few weeks after release.  I selected 3 months because it was the best deal.  A friend inviteded me back to WoW.  I played WoW for about a month and decided to leave again.  The fact that I'd already paid for 3 months of CXL was reason enough to give the game another try.  I'm not sure I'd be playing CXL if I hadn't already paid.  Since I'm in these forums you can imagine that I'm playing fairly seriously again and will probably continue to PO

I guess what I'm saying is - the 3 month subscription kind of suckered me in to playing again, and might keep me paying... but I don't really have strong feelings about it either way.

[site400 12]

Originally posted by: John-SJ

We can see how the PO is doing just by looking at the number of cities on each server, and has the number of servers increased since release?

For instance, I played my 7-day free trial a couple of weeks after release. At the time there were 2 U.S. servers with between 5-6 thousand cities on each server.quote>

But what we don't know is how long inactive cities remain on the server before they are freed up.  In particular, how long do cities created by people who used their 7-day free trial stay online before they deleted. 

I see a butt-load of cities every day, but only a very small number are actually "in use".

MC could just leave cities in play for weeks after a person's trial ends just to create a sense of "fullness" on the planet.

Who knows!

[John-SJ 13]

Originally posted by: site400

Originally posted by: John-SJ

We can see how the PO is doing just by looking at the number of cities on each server, and has the number of servers increased since release?

For instance, I played my 7-day free trial a couple of weeks after release. At the time there were 2 U.S. servers with between 5-6 thousand cities on each server.quote>

But what we don't know is how long inactive cities remain on the server before they are freed up.  In particular, how long do cities created by people who used their 7-day free trial stay online before they deleted. 

I see a butt-load of cities every day, but only a very small number are actually "in use".

MC could just leave cities in play for weeks after a person's trial ends just to create a sense of "fullness" on the planet.

Who knows!

quote>

True enough.  Okay, more to the point,  How many active U.S. servers are there today?  And how full are they?  Surely there must be at least 3 or 4 by now, right?

[IntoxiNation 0]

I just found out about this and it is a very bad move on MC's part. Sure they might be "restructuring" their plans, but let's consider the fact that next week marks 3 months since the game was released and I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people finding out the hard way that the price basically went up on them. Oh well - looks like solo mode from here on out.

FYI Mods: Given the time frame I mentioned above I got a feeling more people are going to be bringing this up. It might be a good idea to sticky this thread for awhile. I didn't know it existed and that was using the category search for "3 month subscription" before starting another thread. That search returned 0 results.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I personally would not want to withdraw a 3 month subscription because I would be back on even after a 1month hiatus at most.

[kiwispanker 1]

Originally posted by: Kevin Ar18

Originally posted by: site400

But what we don't know is how long inactive cities remain on the server before they are freed up.  In particular, how long do cities created by people who used their 7-day free trial stay online before they deleted. 

I see a butt-load of cities every day, but only a very small number are actually "in use".

MC could just leave cities in play for weeks after a person's trial ends just to create a sense of "fullness" on the planet.

Who knows!

quote>

Quote from Matthew:

The rules are:

- Trial account (no registered CD-key) : cities are kept for a week after the trial has ended

- 7 days PO tryout (registered CD-key) : cities are kept for a month after the tryout period has ended

- PO subscriber : cities are kept for at least 6 months (but can be longer as we'll try and keep them for as long as possible)quote>

It's probably not to create a sense of fullness, but to preserve old cities if people decide to come back.

quote>

My 7 day  trial city is still "in planet". and that was more than 2 months ago.

[SimFox 802]

Kivispanker:

But of course it is there! Don't you see this is how MC creates an illusion of wide uptake of their PO. Would they really remove all those freebie cities the planets would be deserted.

You should take anything Mathew says here with a huge pinch of salt. He is, after all an employee of MC who is he to market their product. So his allegiance is to that goal and not to truth or, don't be naive, community. His company had demonstrated this painfully clear on numerous occasion and often through him personally...

[IntoxiNation 0]

Back in the beginning of November I went through and counted the cities on the planets and there were about 43,000. Now it looks like there is around 50,000. My brother in laws city is still there and he just did the free week trial right after CXL was released, so it's been sitting there 3 months. So it looks like cities aren't getting deleted and with only a 7,000 city increase over the past 2 months, I would say that the PO isn't doing as well as MC was hoping. Of course dropping the 2 and 3 month subscription option at a time when a lot of 3 month subscriptions will expire won't do anything to help that.

The approach MC has taken with this is really poor business practice. It's much better to keep current customers than it is to tick them off and hope they will return. It looks like a lot of people are pretty much done with the P.O. because of this. Once they are done, I would say 85-90% will stay done. Why give it another chance, risking the same stunt being pulled by MC again? Instead they will either start playing solo mode and be happy with that, or they will give up on CXL all together, because of the bad taste this move has left in their mouths.

Simply put, MC has just shot themselves in the foot with a deer slug. The best thing they could do right now is re institute the 2 and 3 month deals, with a good-faith discount and work on their new program during that period. They also need to be more forthcoming with their user base. A simple blog post on the CXL site explaining why they dropped the 2 and 3 month options would have softened the blow a lot, instead of the "making people hunt them down for an answer" approach.

[commanderkai 38]

Originally posted by: mr cars

People are saying that MC are outta money. If they were then they wouldn't have released a christmas pack to ALL players and we would be seeing stuff about MC losing money on the news.quote>

Maybe, but the issue is, we're not really that sure. MC, unlike EA, Ubisoft, and other large scale companies, are not that large to receive major attention from mainstream media sources, or gaming sites. It's hard to tell if MC is being profitable or not due to the secretive nature of the company, as well as the small stature of the company as well...

Plus, content patches aren't exactly a tell tale sign, because it's not really known when the content was created.

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: commanderkai

Maybe, but the issue is, we're not really that sure. MC, unlike EA, Ubisoft, and other large scale companies, are not that large to receive major attention from mainstream media sources, or gaming sites. It's hard to tell if MC is being profitable or not due to the secretive nature of the company, as well as the small stature of the company as well...

Plus, content patches aren't exactly a tell tale sign, because it's not really known when the content was created.

quote>

Yeah even if MC went totally belly-up, I doubt it would get much attention from the mainstream media. Software companies come and go everyday, and MC has never been a really big player in the arena.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Originally posted by: mr cars

People are saying that MC are outta money. If they were then they wouldn't have released a christmas pack to ALL players and we would be seeing stuff about MC losing money on the news.quote>

The way things go out of business is quite surprising. MC is just not going to come out and say "hey, we're losing money". Look at Steve & Barry's, for instance (of course, it seems like the entire thing was just a pyramid scheme in their case) but STILL!

[PLB82 0]

Honestly, it's going to be okay for players either way. If MC survives and does well, then they will continue to update the game and make it better.

On the other hand, if MC fails, it might even be better for gamers-(single player gamers at least). My understanding is that a big part of the problem with user-created content is that MC doesn't want it in the game and each time they release an update the game won't work with any custom content that had been created prior to update. If MC isn't around, and we have a "final" official version, then the modders can really go to work. Adding custom content, reworking trading, changing the way pollution or traffic works.

[Bountytaker 0]

Originally posted by: IntoxiNation

Originally posted by: commanderkai

Maybe, but the issue is, we're not really that sure. MC, unlike EA, Ubisoft, and other large scale companies, are not that large to receive major attention from mainstream media sources, or gaming sites. It's hard to tell if MC is being profitable or not due to the secretive nature of the company, as well as the small stature of the company as well...

Plus, content patches aren't exactly a tell tale sign, because it's not really known when the content was created.

quote>

Yeah even if MC went totally belly-up, I doubt it would get much attention from the mainstream media. Software companies come and go everyday, and MC has never been a really big player in the arena.

quote>

Monte Cristo Multimedia is in SIGNIFICANT financial difficulty.  According to http://www.infogreffe.fr/infogreffe/index.jsp, the website for the Trade and Companies Registry of France, they LOST money for the fiscal year's 2006, 2007, and 2008.  Their current financial disclosings to the French government have them losing 2.819 kEuro for fiscal year 2009, which equals somewhere around 4 million USD.

Combined with the resignation of a "director" in September, and the reconstruction of NET Assets after the loss of ONE HALF of their Capital in May (both filings are listed in the 71 documents they have on record), it looks like things are pretty dire for MC.

I tried passing this news on to gaming websites I frequent, but there was little care.  I sent a heads up to some friend of mine who play, but they, like I, had no desire to post here.  I even informed one or two former contacts from the old forums/beta that I know post here, but they did not think it was appropriate to post.

I popped in for a sec, saw what you guys were discussing, and thought I'd share.  Likely my one, and only, post here, so I hope it helps.  Feel free to check out that site, type in Monte Cristo Multimedia in the search field.  If you use google, you can translate the names of the 71 filings.

Good luck CXL players.

[mentarman 14]

Well, that all seems to date from well before the game came out. So not sure it helps a lot. It just covers the time period of developing the game but not them actually making any money off all that development time. It just says to me they have a lot riding on this game, but I think we already knew that.

I think more key at this point would be what has happened since they actually started taking some money in, whether that is living up to expectations, and what they plan to do about it if not.

[Herdervriend 46]

I do not read the whole tread, because that is just to much for me, but I will give a opinion about the case.

1) Bountytaker: They not accept your stuff because it's to negative, companies don't want that to be published everywhere, it will only keep it from crashing.

2) Subscription, I found it a weird Idea from the beginning, now with these high prices, I think I will stick to 1 month gaming maximum.

3) Otherwise I get MC, they need the money and we need to stop complaining. All games has his time when it goes bad, lucky MC got it now and not in 5 years. Maybe, if we just let them go, then maybe in 5 years this game will still be as great as let's say, Battlefield 2.

4) I am really getting scared to from all this messages, if it keeps on this way, I won;'t even be able to play the game at all, and that will make me sad.

[feelgood 0]

Sigh!!! Reading this thread makes me feel sad. If only MC could do the right thing the first time! It's quality principle.

I know, they maybe are getting loads of money by now but we never know. I've holding buying the game until now. Maybe I should just left CXL for good, hmmm.

[morriswalters 16]

No new data here.  This data was available during the bata.  So if the game you want isn't the game available today and if single player isn't enough than you shouldn't buy.

[DazzaDazza 29]

Well it doesn't surprise me that MC did not make any money in 2008 they weren't selling anything, so it's pretty hard to make money when they where designing CXL. I don't normally uses this a excuses, and I can't stand when people do, but MC are not EA they don't make 10 or more title's a year, they make one every 2 year buy the look of things. Just from your statement you say there net lose is about 4 Mill, really do you think they would go under because they lost 4 million dollars, hardly, even for a company as large as MC they should be able to cover that, unless they have monkeys running the show. They would have made up 4 mill even before the game was released though pre sales to wholesalers. As fore 2006 and 2007, well my guess is that is city life territory. And lets face it that game was terrible.

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

Well it doesn't surprise me that MC did not make any money in 2008 they weren't selling anything, so it's pretty hard to make money when they where designing CXL. I don't normally uses this a excuses, and I can't stand when people do, but MC are not EA they don't make 10 or more title's a year, they make one every 2 year buy the look of things. Just from your statement you say there net lose is about 4 Mill, really do you think they would go under because they lost 4 million dollars, hardly, even for a company as large as MC they should be able to cover that, unless they have monkeys running the show. They would have made up 4 mill even before the game was released though pre sales to wholesalers. As fore 2006 and 2007, well my guess is that is city life territory. And lets face it that game was terrible.quote>

Actually though they lost $4 million US last year and have been losing money since 2006. That's most likely from the development costs of CXL and the fact they don't have any other big selling games to help carry them over. The thing is though, think about what that means for CXL. They were planning on some big sale numbers just to break even. I doubt game sales alone have been enough to do that. Just to make up for 2009 that would amount to selling more than 100,000 games, depending on what the mark up is for the distributors.

Now they do make money off the P.O. (which is what this threads about), but consider the fact that they most likely have a pretty big monthly overhead just in server costs alone. Add to that the staffing of developers and graphic designers, and the monthly costs really go up. Given the negative reviews of CXL and what I saw to be decreasing P.O. activity over the past couple of months, it's hard to see how MC stays afloat for to long.

To recover I could see MC taking 1 of 2 routes for the PO. Either come back with it being much cheaper and bank on quanity, or go with the current or even slightly higher price structure and bank more on quality. Each has it's downfalls. One of the big problems with going on quanity is that means MC will have to open up more planets and it will consume more server resources. With quality it is a big gamble. Are people going to be willing to pay $9.95 a month or more for the PO? I doubt there won't be the numbers on that to keep the game alive.

IMHO, the best thing for MC to do is make the content packs available to solo mode. Sell them as add on packs and try to build the business better that way. I personally wouldn't mind spending $15-$20 for the Bus content pack if I could do it in solo. The only reason I ever did the PO was for the content packs, but "renting" them for $120 a year is just down right ludicrous. 

[DazzaDazza 29]

at IntoxiNation wote:

Actually though they lost $4 million US last year and have been losing money since 2006. That's most likely from the development costs of

CXL

and the fact they don't have any other big selling games to help carry them over. The thing is though, think about what that means for

CXL

. They were planning on some big sale numbers just to break even. I doubt game sales alone have been enough to do that. Just to make up for 2009 that would amount to selling more than 100,000 games, depending on what the mark up is for the distributors.

MC don’t make money base on how many copies the retailers sell to the public, they sell a set amount to them, depending on how well the retailers think the game will sell.  So any CXL box you see for sale anywhere MC all ready got the money for a long time ago.

The box sales are not a true indication on how many copies MC acutely sold. There could be anther 100,000 copies of the game spared out across the world still yet to be sold buy the retailers.       

 

Also I don’t know the inner working of MC but if they have been loosening money for the lest 4 years, and they still manege to gather enough capital to make CXL then, something isn’t a float hear, it could be many thing, such as, MC are there as a tax ride off of anther company so there sole peruse is to run at a loses, but with out knowing the French tax system, or the people that own CXL,  It would be hard to say. MC certainly don’t sound like a company that have been failing for 4 years what with CXL and all.  All I can say is you should not juge a book by it cover.  

Or what you read on the net !

           

 

Now they do make money off the P.O. (which is what this threads about), but consider the fact that they most likely have a pretty big monthly overhead just in server costs alone. Add to that the staffing of developers and graphic designers, and the monthly costs really go up. Given the negative reviews of

CXL

and what I saw to be decreasing P.O. activity over the past couple of months, it's hard to see how MC stays afloat for to long.

The serves ant’s that expensive to run at all, in simple terms it is just a power bill, a large telephone bill and 1or 2 tech guys to make shore it’s running smoothly, all the money is in buying the serves and installing them. I would say they have also cut down there design team and all the rest of the staff that where need to make the game, but have come redundant now because there id nothing to do. Hence why where are not getting update like we where before.    

         

[zwr100 2]

Originally posted by: zwr100

I signed up for PO a few weeks after release.  I selected 3 months because it was the best deal.  A friend inviteded me back to WoW.  I played WoW for about a month and decided to leave again.  The fact that I'd already paid for 3 months of CXL was reason enough to give the game another try.  I'm not sure I'd be playing CXL if I hadn't already paid.  Since I'm in these forums you can imagine that I'm playing fairly seriously again and will probably continue to PO

I guess what I'm saying is - the 3 month subscription kind of suckered me in to playing again, and might keep me paying... but I don't really have strong feelings about it either way.quote>

I'm guessing this might be the reason for the switch.

Perhaps the accountants at MC want to know what kind of income to expect from CXL in the long run so they can make long term decisions.  I'm guessing there were some people who signed up, but didn't renew (or perhaps they expect that) leaving the accountants scrambling and plans for CXL uncertain.  If they force us to renew every month they get a clearer idea of how many players are going to continue to play.  Given the inconsiderate manor of the change, perhaps they pushed some on-the-fence players out, thus identifying the core paying customers.  That implies to me that they are most interested in understanding their income base in order to make long term decisions.

If they just wanted to rake in every penny they might have been better off leaving things as they were so they didn't upset anyone, and letting people pay for 3 months despite possibly quitting sooner.  I believe MC is always re-evaluting their allocation of resources and need clearer figures from CXL.  Perhaps the game will stabilize at some point and we'll see the 3 month option return.

On a side note:

Would you be willing to pay slightly more/month for a better game?  Would you be happy to pay a little less for a slightly worse game?  Even if the game charged $100/month the game couldn't magically be fixed.  When the game does have all of it's glitches and bugs worked out, and most of the expected content, the community will still disagree about how certain things should work. 

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

MC don’t make money base on how many copies the retailers sell to the public, they sell a set amount to them, depending on how well the retailers think the game will sell.  So any

CXL

box you see for sale anywhere MC all ready got the money for a long time ago.

The box sales are not a true indication on how many copies MC acutely sold. There could be anther 100,000 copies of the game spared out across the world still yet to be sold buy the retailers.       

 

Also I don’t know the inner working of MC but if they have been loosening money for the lest 4 years, and they still manege to gather enough capital to make

CXL

then, something isn’t a float hear, it could be many thing, such as, MC are there as a tax ride off of anther company so there sole peruse is to run at a loses, but with out knowing the French tax system, or the people that own

CXL

,  It would be hard to say. MC certainly don’t sound like a company that have been failing for 4 years what with

CXL

and all.  All I can say is you should not juge a book by it cover.  

Or what you read on the net !

There are not that many retailers selling CXL. No one knows the true numbers. I would say Steam has been the biggest seller of the game and that even isn't an actual physical unit. It was just presented as a bare minimum estimate of what MC would have to sell (not counting PO) to recoup for 1 year of losses.

           

 

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

The serves ant’s that expensive to run at all, in simple terms it is just a power bill, a large telephone bill and 1or 2 tech guys to make shore it’s running smoothly, all the money is in buying the serves and installing them. I would say they have also cut down there design team and all the rest of the staff that where need to make the game, but have come redundant now because there id nothing to do. Hence why where are not getting update like we where before.    

       

I've already been round and round about this on another thread. Sorry but you are wrong. Servers are expensive. Bandwidth is expensive and so are the people to keep the servers up and running. I know I have found a handful of PO servers running in the U.S. alone. Run CXL with Wireshark and you will be amazed at the amount of bandwidth a PO game uses and the number of servers it connects to. Yeah they probably have the 1 or 2 tech guys in France to handle updates and problems with their software, but they are paying companies to keep these servers operational. If not then how much will people complain if a hard drive goes down on a U.S. server and they have to wait for a tech to fly from France to the U.S.  to fix it?

[DazzaDazza 29]

The game only uploads saved games to the server. And there is a chat system; it's not a real time game like some others around that have to transfer a mass amount of data every second you are on line. Also I don't know about the US server part, I always assumed it's there is one central data base that it is sending to. but regardless, the serves wouldn't be owned by them they would be renting it, and keeping there serves there on line is not MC problem, that's the company that is running it. Also that's why they pay anther company to do so. So they won't be sending anyone anywhere to fix anything. Again it's just transferring a saved game. That is transferred the saved game from you computer to MC data base And it only dose that them you are quitting the city.

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

The game only uploads saved games to the server. And there is a chat system; it's not a real time game like some others around that have to transfer a mass amount of data every second you are on line. Also I don't know about the US server part, I always assumed it's there is one central data base that it is sending to. but regardless, the serves wouldn't be owned by them they would be renting it, and keeping there serves there on line is not MC problem, that's the company that is running it. Also that's why they pay anther company to do so. So they won't be sending anyone anywhere to fix anything. Again it's just transferring a saved game. That is transferred the saved game from you computer to MC data base And it only dose that them you are quitting the city.quote>

It also does autosaves throughout the game. From what I saw that appears to be more of a progressive type save, with a complete save on exit.

As far as "live data", there is that to some extent in the PO with trades. It has to be that way so two people can't take the same contract.

But you are right on the servers. Most likely they are doing a cloud system for better failover and availability. Since trades and chats are limited to the current planet a user is on, that also reduces some of the overhead of keeping data consistent amongst the entire network. That way they can keep a minnimal staff on hand for actual tech problems. The hosting company would handle hardware failures and their people handle the software side, since they are most likely running some customized server software.

I know when I was doing my tinkering I went to some large cities (4 million + pop). Those cities would be 20-30mb downloads. I bet MC got a pretty big hit on bandwidth when the game first came out and those cities started popping up, just from people exploring. I would venture to say that has slowed down pretty much now. I remember a few days after the release when MC suspended the 7 day free trial for PO because of so much response.

[DazzaDazza 29]

Very true dose it saves to the network though out the game as well, I forgot about that. Do you know what it is saving? I always assumed that it was only saving the city stats, population cash flow, the amount of X you can trade, so it appears real time. But it's can be anywhere from always 5 minutes to 1 second behind. But that only a guess.

[IntoxiNation 0]

I couldn't tell what it was saving since the data was compressed and I was just reading raw packets. It seems like every auto save of my city of 60,000 was around 1mb or so.

[masochist 111]

Just because I didn't see the question answered on this page (forgive me if it was and I simply missed it):

Unmanaged cities are kept on servers for 6 months after subscription periods have been suspended before they are removed. I'm pretty sure it has less to do with creating "a sense of "fullness" on the planet," and more with allowing those who have been out of the game for a while to come back to their cities if they wish to subscribe again sometime down the line (say, for instance, when more patches and GEM's are released).

[SimFox 802]

Well would that be the case it should be easy to re-activate those sleeper cities. Or actually filter them out from Planet view, given that "planet" is no more then graphical presentation of the database. The fact that this hasn't been done does very strongly indicate the intention to create appearance of "fullness". Things happen for a reason. And simple reasoning already a year ago would and did predict what we see today pretty well...

But than there is Ashero who believes in miracles.

As for the speculation on the subject of MC financial situation one must be very aware that being in the reds 2 years ago and today is "two huge differences". Just as covering couple of mils of loses with external financing.

It is all sad... seems to be that a good game in our beloved genre is financially unattainable...