The rise and fall of Cities: Skylines

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I grew up playing Sim City on the Commodore Amiga, and I followed the series until the calamity that was EA's Sim City 2013. That game was a disaster from day one: It launched with always-online DRM, tiny city sizes, constant server issues and crappy traffic AI. It also cost 60 bucks.

Cities: Skylines My game crashed, so here's a pic from the Steam store (Cities: Skylines)

Colossal Order save the day

So when Cities in Motion developer Colossal Order brought out Cities: Skylines in early 2015, it was the antidote we all wanted - it had offline play, bigger maps, smarter traffic and a sandbox mode. It also launched with Steam Workshop support and cost only $30! Not surprisingly, it sold over 250,000 copies in the first 24 hours. And it became one my most played games of all time.

How Paradox poisoned the well

Soon after that, Paradox Interactive, the publisher, started aggressively pushing DLCs for all their big games. As of November 2025, SteamDB lists 72 DLC for Cities: Skylines.

This was a real problem. The player base became fragmented with people owning different sets of DLC, mods became a nightmare to maintain, game performance struggled with more assets and complexity, the total cost of the game ballooned, and bugs in the base game were left unfixed.

Cities: Skylines 2 flopped hard

In 2023, the much-anticipated sequel came out... to terrible reviews. It was broken at launch, performed terribly even on high-end PCs, lacked features that CS1 players considered essential, had no Steam Workshop support, and even sold an Expansion Pass that included DLC which wasn't available yet. Two years on, the game still only has 53% Mixed reviews on Steam.

Paradox shows Colossal Order the door

Inevitably, the saga came to an end today when Paradox and Colossal Order parted ways. The publisher is keeping the IP and will have their internal team, Iceflake Studios, take over Cities: Skylines 2 development from 2026.

It's a real shame, but perhaps history will repeat itself. When EA screwed up with Sim City, Paradox gave us Cities: Skylines. Now that Paradox have screwed up, will a new city builder take its place? I hope so!