Paradox fires Cities: Skylines 2 developers

The roughly 30-person team at Colossal Order set a milestone in the city building genre with Cities: Skylines, which became even better over the years thanks to numerous DLCs and mods. Their attempt to surpass this masterpiece was not successful, as Cities: Skylines II (from $49 for PS5 on Amazon) currently sits at a Metacritic score of 74 out of 100 possible points and a user score of only 4.3 of 10.

Numerous technical issues at launch played a major role in this, and even years later players are still complaining about system requirements that are too high for the graphics of the game. Additionally, there are crashes and missing features that in some cases have been promised prior to launch. Updates to fix these problems have been released at a slow pace, but paid DLCs have been released. Publisher Paradox Interactive is now pulling the plug. In its official forum, the publisher announced that Cities: Skylines 2 will no longer be developed by Colossal Order but by Iceflake Studios.

The studio is best known for the post apocalyptic building game Surviving the Aftermath but has otherwise developed smaller titles. The studio is based in Finland and is owned by Paradox Interactive. Colossal Order is expected to keep working on performance patches for the next few months and finally add the promised bicycles before development is handed over completely. Iceflake Studios will then develop additional free updates and paid DLCs.