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How‽ You used Unity for the first game! Why would expect a difference for the second?
We basically looked into the very new technology that Unity was offering, and that turned out to be a mistake, in the sense that there were features that didn't actually fulfill the promise
Sounds like the Unity marketing convinced them that the capabilities they needed were soon to be added to the engine and they believed it.
AIUI, Unity has two types of systems the sparkly new stuff, which has the cutting-edge features but is unstable, and the old stuff, which had cutting-edge features 5 years ago but was abandoned while unstable, except in the last 5 years the bugs have been mostly documented and worked around. So the only way you can get new features is by adopting the shiny new thing, and the only way to get a stable engine is to go write one yourself. The latter is a terrible idea, FYI.
They also used Unity for Cities in Motion 2, which was a de facto prototype for Cities Skylines.
I much preferred their own homegrown engine from Cities in Motion 1; although since it is single threaded, it can bring even modern systems to their knees (at 1440+ resolutions) with mods, a map that maxes out the engine and freelook (especially if you do a horizon view of the city).
Two different scopes.
Skylines 1 is very much a traffic management game. Everything relates to solving traffic problems.
Skylines 2 is wider in scope in terms of city simulation and needs.
Didn't independent analysis show that they had awful LODs and such on release, causing massive performance loss? Maybe Unity was supposed to automagically take care of that, but if it didn't work, doing the work manually was always an option. They just chose not to.
If your game's broke, don't release it. That's like a carpenter blaming his tools for a slanted kitchen cabinet. I don't care if your saw blade had a manufacturing defect, take it back and fix it!
It'd be a case study in what not to do if publishers didn't make that same mistake over and over again. There is such a thing as unacceptably poor performance and fixing it cannot possibly be more expensive than lost sales revenue.
The LOD and occlusion issue was actually really funny. People discovered that the game was rendering all of the individual teeth in each citizens mouth all the time, even when the camera was 1000' in the air.
To say that CS2 shipped in an unfinished state would be an insult to most early access games.
Former Cities: Skylines 2 boss. As mentioned in the article, a new team took over a few months ago to clean up the mess.
I am curious what their next project will be, I am hoping for Cities in Motion 3 (or an equivalent game with a different name if Paradox owns the trademark to Cities in Motion), but we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I hope they take some time off before coming back with a passion project they actually care about.
Gee who would have known...
I don’t buy it.
It’s not as bad as Gearbox complaining about Unreal (which they’ve worked on since 2005), but all the coverage I’ve seen points to self-infliction.
They’ve worked on Unity since at least 2014.
And other lower budget Unity sim games like Humankind, Timberborn and Ixion (just to name a few) run fine, and look great.
Now, maybe Unity's overhead and issues is a factor, but it’s not the only one. They messed up.
Making such a complex game on Unity is a suicide.
They don't give you access to the source files - that alone shall be a red flag.
They absolutely do give you access to the source files, if you pay $$$. They don't say the figure explicitly (they have a "contact sales" button instead), but I believe it's six figures.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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