KTM Advance corporate serious games: Starbank and Moonshield

Pierre Breese, an industrial property consultant, and Jean-François Rapp, an expert in knowledge management, created Advance in 1995 to help companies use their knowledge capital. In 2003 the team of KTM System joined, bringing custom e-learning for professional skills, and in early 2004 the information-systems trainer Millenium followed. Beyond e-learning and serious games, the company offered pre-production advice and knowledge-management consulting, with a focus on distribution methods, change management and learner motivation. The merged company became KTM Advance, serving large multinational clients, and had just opened a London office when the announcement ran in late 2009.

Its pitch to clients was that serious games need two kinds of professionals who speak different languages. Educators talk about pedagogical objectives, cognitive abilities and storyboards, game designers about pitches, game play loops and triggers. Valerie Boudier, the company's Knowledge Manager, described a knowledge-management step that produces a cognitive model before the designer builds the game.

Starbank the Game was designed for BNP Paribas to train new hires. It is a builder and management strategy game in which the player builds the bank of the year 2505 on a distant planet across five levels, investing in banking structures and services while handling market events. A control panel shows cash flow, profitability, risk and stock market movement in real time. By March 2009 the game counted more than 95,000 connections and 20,011 players.

Moonshield was a management strategy game for Thales. The player commands a lunar base and draws on Thales technologies to defend Earth from meteorites. It aimed to build brand recognition abroad and to raise Thales's visibility as an employer. After a year there were 200,000 connections from 120,000 different players, 70 percent of them outside France, and more than 80,000 visitors moved on to the Thales recruitment website. Thales's recruitment and mobility director said the investment almost paid for itself.

Blossom Flower, made for MEA-I and Hewlett Packard, is a management and role-playing game in which micro-entrepreneurs run a flower business and learn to use technology well.

The company's website, ktm-advance.com, does not load in November 2026, and no other official page for the company or its games turned up. None of the three games is confirmed as available. The figures above come from the 2009 announcement and describe results at that time.