Iceflake Studio's portfolio does not exactly inspire confidence, feels like this is the end of cities skylines. What a shame.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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This does look quite bad. What a shame, I bought the game at lunch and it was buggy and unstable. I assumed it will be improved and fixed over the next years. When I tried it a few months ago it had most of the same flaws including instabilities which are a deal breaker for this kind of game. And now they essentially killed it.
I did that with kerbal space program 2 because I wanted to support the project, and now it's dead. The worst and infuriating part is that it's still selling for $50 on steam as early access, so someone from take-two is pocketing the money. How's this shit not illegal.
Enshittification comes for us all.
But we'll always have the OG. Great thing about a good game is that it doesn't go away because of a bad sequel.
I can't play CS1 after playing CS2
Sounds like a skills issue.
Oh wow. They are way out of their depth here. Best of luck to them, I’m expecting a shallow mobile game in the future.
Oh they made Surviving the Aftermath? Nah, they’ll do fine, that means they’ll be working closely with Paradox again.
I've heard alright things about Surviving the Aftermath. Still, I agree. It looks bleak. It's not dead, but this does seem to be it being put on life support.
It's decent, I enjoyed it. I do not think a colony sim sets them up well expertise wise for the transit sim/infrastructure design side of things though which I have always believed is the core of Cities Skylines though.
That's true. They're related genres, but fundamentally different. Still, all the architecture is already set up. If they can hire some of the C:S devs (they're in the same country) then they could transition well. I don't exactly expect them to, especially since C:S2 isn't doing great even with the people who seemingly understood it, but it's possible.
They are in the same city even I think.
I feel sorry for colossal order. They're clearly some very passionate people who's dreams have been ruined by their own executives and paradox.
We'll have to wait and see.
They aren't shutting down, they're parting with Paradox, and hence the Cities IP.
It's possible this will set them free to pursue something that'll allow that passion to shine through even brighter.
Hopefully. Their potential is impressive.
I've heard of developers choosing to make new games, but I didn't know games could choose to be made by new developers! Inspiring!
KSP2 comes to mind
Bloodlines 2 came to my mind. And it even has the same publisher as Skylines.
I didn’t know games could choose to be made by new developers
No, game's aren't alive and cannot choose anything. The higher-ups at publisher and IP owner Paradox Interactive can, however.
Usually these things happen at Microsoft when they shut down studios, like what happened with Essemble Studios (Age of Empires, Halo Wars) and Double Helix Games (Killer Instinct).
Age of Empires is a bit different, because I don't think they've moved the same game around between different studios in the midst of development. ES got shut down in 2009, with all existing Age of Empires games having long since ceased development. Then in 2013 Microsoft decided to release an HD remaster of the 1999 Age of Empires 2, and they brought Hidden Path on to do that. And then with the 2019 Definitive Edition they brought on board Forgotten Empires (who had also developed the official expansions in HD). The new development team in each case was being brought on to create a completely new release.
The KSP2 and Bloodlines 2 examples above both involved unreleased in-development games being given by the publisher to a different development team, and Skylines 2 is a still-supported game being given a different developer for future updates.
C:S2 (not to be confused with CS2) is not "mid development" in the usual sense either. It's well post-launch. It is still being updated though, with new features added. The modern thing of launching games before they're done has messed up how we speak about games.
But yeah, you're right.
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Relevant to note the publisher (Paradox Interactive) is also known for extremely poor in-house QA. Both game and DLC releases are known to be extremely buggy.
[Hallikainen] We’re confident that the franchise will continue to thrive under Paradox’s leadership
That's corpo speech for "we lost the franchise, PI has it under its direct control now". Note Iceflake Studios is "part of Paradox Interactive".
The series is dead. Nothing to see here. Move on, gentle folks.
The poor state of Stellaris QA is incredible.
It feels like one of those friends you adore, with a constantly relapsing, and worsening, drug habit.
Meanwhile EU5 released with incredible QA for the starting centuries, with dwindling testing done for the later ones. And I can't even blame them, knowing how much slower the game generally is.
Sounds about right :(
Stellaris was like that early in its life, too.
Maybe they’ll give it to The Chinese Room who will turn it into a walking simulator with a smidge of awful, repetitive combat mixed in.
I feel like most accusations of bad QA have their roots upstream of the QA department (or lack thereof)
It's possible. For example, the quality assurance department finds 9001 critical bugs, but whoever is in charge says "ship it lol" regardless of those bugs. In fact I think this might be the problem with CS2, I wouldn't be surprised if Paradox was the one doing the QA for Colossal Order.
Still a bad QA matter, though. And it'll get worse.
Not surprising at all.
I found a copy of the game online because I wanted to try it out before I considered buying it (I had a feeling I wouldn't like it). I got maybe an hour of playtime before I stopped playing. The new pretty skin doesn't do enough to make the game worth it.
I dont know why they chose to chase graphics, it wasnt important for the first game, it wasnt going to be important for the second. I suppose it could have been Paradox controlling decisions.
We just wanted more systems and simulations.
I hope that CO can move on and make some great games.
They didn't chase graphics. Yeah the lighting system is better and the Civs having over 1000 polys is overkill for something you're gonna focus on for 0.1% of playtime. CO failed by choosing an architecture that was not ready for production use. There was a few devlogs where they straight up said they were using pre-release versions of Unity that were half baked to develop CS2. They were testing some technology Unity was supposed to release in the future. Because of that they had to write a bunch of tools FOR UNITY themselves. In doing so they couldn't get ahead of technical problems that kept popping up because it meant they had to fuck with Unity(the software and the company) more and more.
The biggest example of this is the asset importer. Why in a video game built with modding in mind does this game have not have an asset importer almost 3 years later? Why did it take 2 years to release a DLC that was supposed to be out in the first 6 months? Why did it take 2 years to "fix" the economy part of the sim? They're never gonna fix the busted ass traffic. CO built this game on a half built foundation and they've been paying for it since day 1.
Because they basically had to rewrite the entire game after Unity pulled the rug out from underneath them.
Fair enough. Seems like my hope for them is slim, I was expecting similar corporate practices anyway, but seems they have bigger problems with development decision making.
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What are you talking about? The graphics look practically identical to the original.
The size of their staff going from 1 to 2 made no sense to me with how much grander scale of a simulation they spoke of. It seemed unrealistic before launch and to this day they still seem to be struggling with it. Really screwed the pooch. Paradox for being penny pinchers for what could have become their Civilization in regards to beloved hyper geeky but high selling type of game. Colossal Order for not growing up and then trying to play off criticisms with how they're a hunky dory scrappy small indie developer that can't staff up for the AAA scope sequel of a hit of a game with major amounts of DLC. Self infantalization are for your early 20s
Lol, Cities Skylines is officially dead then. Seems like the team didn't really know how to make it without Karoliina Korppoo already, but I have zero faith in Paradox/IceFlake making it on their own. The core of Cities Skylines was always the expertise in transit/city simulation developed from Cities In Motion.
Very corporate thinking. 'We have the IP for the name of a game with a dedicated following. That's more important than who makes the game, right?'
If you view it as them seeing that the current studio has failed, then this is them trying to fix it by bringing it in house.
IF they expand the studio and invest, then they could save it.
Or it could just die like KSP
I guess the console version will never become a thing then
Console ports are usually given to a different studio anyway. So I’m not sure this changes much by itself.
I'm not too hopeful. The new devs' portfolio doesn't make it seem like they have enough experience to handle a big project like this.
It's sad because while Colossal Order definitely messed up the launch (though I'm still unsure whether it's their fault or Paradox — probably both), they knew what makes city builders good. I feel like two years in, they've finally handled all the faults of the base game, and were ready to build upon it and release new content.
I have to be optimistic because, like I said, the base game is now pretty good to build upon, but the new devs don't inspire confidence.
It’s 50% Unity, 40% CO, and 10% Paradox.
CO chose to use Unity for CS2, Unity did not have all the needed fratures and framework for the game to CO ended up creating software for Unity and using prerelease builds of Unity which are very unstable. Paradox all the while had a set deadline for CO to hit.
Well, using pre-release builds was still a decision by CO. While I understand the decision, it is risky, and the risk didn't pay off this time.
Totally unaware this was a thing.
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