After the troubled development of Cities: Skylines 2, Colossal Order and Paradox are parting ways

It’s hard to believe it’s been over two years since the launch of Cities: Skylines 2. It was a disaster, but it showed promise. At the time, I would have bet the Colossal Order could turn things around, but after two years, a lot of problems still persist and fixes have been relatively slow coming.

Today, Paradox has announced that it’s parting ways with Colossal Order, with further development of Cities: Skylines 2 (and I presume Cities: Skylines 1), moving over to Iceflake Studios.

The statement says that, “the decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both team,” which I’m not entirely skeptical on. Clearly, there was some sort of mismatch here, whether it was Colossal Order being unable to keep up with Paradox’s expectations or Paradox being unrealistic in its demands. Either way, I’d expect that CO would be eager to wipe the slate clean.

WE’RE GONNA BURN THIS CITY! BURN THIS CITY!

Frankly, and this is pure conjecture, I feel like a lot of issues fall squarely with Paradox. Their business model seems to frequently be based in pushing a foundational game out the door with sometimes incomplete features and a lack of polish, then patching and piling on DLC later. Their DLC catalogues stretch out so far that they’ve begun offering subscription models for some of their games, such as Cities: Skylines. Some of the games they’ve published are loved by grand strategy fans, but many still raise eyebrows at their DLC practices. It can feel like buying a complete game piece-by-piece, and can sometimes result in weird imbalances.

And Cities: Skylines 2 launched way too early by any metric. It was a mess when it released, and it’s ultimately the publisher’s decision to release that mess. It’s possible that Colossal Order just bit off more than it could chew when planning Cities: Skylines 2, but it would then be the publisher to decide whether to proceed with the current version or provide a budget for grander revisions.

Paradox has also run aground with relative failures like Harebrained Schemes’ Lamplighters League and the cancellation of Rod Humble’s planned competitor to The Sims, Life by You. At the time, the company suggested they were scaling back and returning to their roots, and I’m not sure what they meant by that because it seems like business as usual.

DEMOLITION

What this actually means for Cities: Skylines 2 remains to be seen. Colossal Order is finishing off a couple updates, and it will be Iceflake’s bag at the start of 2026. Iceflake was recently responsible for 2021’s Surviving the Aftermath, which wasn’t, uh, super well received. However, it’s worth noting that both Iceflake and CO are based in Tampere, Finland, so it’s possible some staff will move over to continue working on Cities: Skylines 2. A fresh developed could be a net gain in the long-run, or it could just embiggen its woes.

It also isn’t clear what Colossal Order will do now, but it could be anything. It’s a clean slate. They could return to their traffic-flow roots, or maybe they’ll make something entirely new.

I just hope Cities: Skylines 2 eventually reaches its potential. There are a lot of new features in it that has me preferring it over the original Cities: Skylines, but it’s often painful to play. Actual non-survival city builders in the vein of SimCity are distressingly rare these days. To be fair, it’s a complicated genre. Clearly, though, there’s a big enough audience to warrant the work.