.png){kind=logo}
The market for simulation games is getting crowded, with too many games released every year. Even in this challenging market, Cities: Skylines has maintained its stable fanbase, who are eagerly looking forward to getting Cities: Skylines 2 on console. Originally, this game was launched on PC in 2023, and since then, the anticipation of it coming to the consoles has been roaming in the air.
Initially, Paradox Interactive planned to release the game across all platforms together, but the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S releases are pending. Once again, the console release got delayed due to some unavoidable issues.
It was October 2023, and everyone was expecting the release of Cities: Skylines 2’s launch on all platforms. However, the plan suddenly got changed, and prior to the official launch, developer Colossal Order announced a delay for the console versions. As a reason, it stated the game wasn’t ready for release on consoles as it unmet "stability and performance targets."
The team acknowledged that these unsolved issues had been impacting the game's quality, leading to the decision to postpone the release indefinitely. At that point, they announced that a thorough review would be done in August 2024 to assess progress and determine a release date.
However, the more the progress continued, the more the development team encountered persisting technical challenges unique to the console platforms. The team reported CPU and GPU issues when players perform certain actions. This resulted in an uneven frame drop rate and memory overloads. These problems were particularly challenging due to the hardware limitations of consoles. For example, whenever players place larger buildings with multiple entities, the system struggles with data load, which causes system failures.
The team tried every possible way to fix this and even lowered the graphics quality to bring the game to a stable state for release on Xbox Series X/S and PS5. However, this compromise resulted in a low visual quality that the team found unacceptable. Therefore, the console version of the game faced multiple delays throughout the years.
After all this turbulence, finally, in 2024, the developer team was determined to release the game, but once again, that idea failed, and the developer team postponed the console release. Thereafter, until now, there’s been no news of the console version of the game. A recent post on the official page of the game mentioned that it was “continue to make steady progress on the console version.” Along with that, the team informed, “despite these advancements, we have more things we need to address before we reach the level of quality and the experience we want for you.”
As of November 2024, Colossal Order has not committed to a new release date for the console versions of Cities: Skylines 2. The team emphasized that the console release remains a top priority, with multiple solutions being explored and experts actively involved in resolving the outstanding issues. Despite these efforts, the absence of a definitive timeline has left many console players uncertain about when they will experience the game on their preferred platforms.
After that, it’s clear that there's no hope for the game to release this year or sooner. The wait of console players will be indefinitely longer as the troubles don't seem to have ended early.
The troubled console release of Cities: Skylines 2 highlighted a lot of important issues that every developer should keep in mind when making a console game. Releasing games on console emphasizes the importance of performance optimization and quality assurance, which this game failed to meet several times in a row. Though Colossal Order continues to address the technical challenges to make it suitable for console release, the time doesn’t seem to come anytime soon. However, this game’s problematic release on console can be a case study for those developers who are aiming to make multiplatform games and release them on all the platforms simultaneously.
