The Cities Skyline Paradox
Why the sequel stumbled
and how a new studio might save it
Announcement: “An Update on Cities: Skylines II” (Paradox Interactive). In mid-November 2025 Paradox Interactive and its long-time partner Colossal Order announced a quiet but monumental shift. After more than fifteen years together, the companies would “pursue independent paths”. The Cities: Skylines franchise – Paradox’s flagship city-building series – would be handed to Iceflake Studios, an internal Finnish team. Colossal Order (CO) would finish one last “Bike Patch” and an asset-editing beta, then move on to other projects. The announcement formalised a split that players and critics had anticipated for months. Cities: Skylines II (CS2) had launched in October 2023 to technical issues, design missteps and a conspicuous lack of mod support. A year later, many of those problems persisted, and Paradox’s patience wore thin.
In this article I attempt to disentangle the facts of that breakup, to understand why CO floundered, why Iceflake has been given the keys, and whether the sequel’s underlying issues can realistically be fixed.
A brief history of the series
Cities: Skylines (2015) emerged from the rubble of Maxis’ SimCity reboot, combining approachable city-planning mechanics with modding openness. Developed by the Helsinki-based Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, CS1 quickly became the dominant city builder. Its success spawned dozens of expansions and thousands of user-made mods via Steam Workshop. CO – a studio of around thirty people – became a darling of the simulation genre.
Technical sources: Launch performance warning (GameSpot); CS2 performance analysis (Paavo Huhtala). In 2023 CO attempted to leap ahead with a sequel. Built in Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) and promising per-citizen simulation, a dynamic economy and cross-platform modding, CS2 launched on PC in October 2023. Even before release, Paradox warned that performance might not meet players’ expectations. The warning was prescient: the game shipped with heavy GPU bottlenecks, slow simulation speeds and a bare-bones economy. An autopsy by developer Paavo Huhtala found that every pedestrian model had 6,000 vertices (complete with fully modelled teeth) and that props such as pallet stacks were rendered in full detail even when invisible. The engine lacked occlusion culling and relied on high-resolution shadow maps, causing “an innumerable number of draw calls”. The result was a city builder that taxed even high-end GPUs while leaving CPU cores idle.
Player critique: “One Year Later – Cities: Skylines II Is Still a Broken, Lifeless Mess” (Paradox Plaza forums). Alongside the rendering problems were deeper simulation issues. A year after release one forum thread titled “One Year Later – Cities: Skylines II Is Still a Broken, Lifeless Mess” complained of mindless citizens, dead public spaces and traffic AI that took nonsensical routes. The poster wrote that the sequel’s touted dynamic economy was “nonexistent”. Such criticisms weren’t isolated; they reflected a broader perception that CS2 had shipped as an unfinished Early Access game. CO acknowledged the problems and postponed the console release and paid DLC to focus on patches. Despite multiple updates, players still reported simulation slow-downs and path-finding issues in 2024 and 2025.
Modding coverage: Paradox Mods FAQ (Shacknews); Hallikainen on missing mod support (Game Rant). Modding – a pillar of the first game – was largely absent. Paradox and CO announced that, unlike CS1’s open Steam Workshop, CS2 would use Paradox Mods, a centralised platform to ensure cross-platform compatibility. In October 2023 Shacknews quoted an official FAQ explaining that mods would be “confined in official capacity to the Paradox Mods platform” because the publisher wanted a single hub accessible on both PC and console. The FAQ went further: “We won’t support other platforms such as Steam Workshop”. This business decision frustrated PC modders and delayed many of the quality-of-life fixes that CS1 had enjoyed through community mods. In February 2024, CO CEO Mariina Hallikainen admitted that the team’s “biggest regret” was launching without mod support; Gamerant summarised her comments, noting that she acknowledged community frustration over the missing Editor and inadequate mod tools.
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