2015 city-building video game

Cities: Skylines is a 2015 city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. They also work to manage various elements of the city, including its budget, health, employment, traffic, and pollution levels. It is also possible to maintain a city in a sandbox mode, which provides more creative freedom for the player.

Cities: Skylines is a progression of development from Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion titles, which focused on designing effective transportation systems. While Colossal felt they had the technical expertise to expand the Cities gameplay into a more full-featured city simulation game, their publisher Paradox Interactive initially held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of the SimCity series. However, they reconsidered after the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, which provided an opportunity for Paradox to establish a competing franchise. Colossal's goal was to create a game engine capable of simulating the daily routines of nearly a million unique citizens, while presenting this to the player in a simple way, allowing the player to easily understand various problems in their city's design. This includes realistic traffic congestion, and the effects of congestion on city services and districts. Since the game's release, various expansions and other DLC have been released for the game. The game also has built-in support for user-generated content.

The game was first released for the Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems on 10 March 2015. Console ports by Tantalus Media were released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles in 2017, for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, and for Google Stadia in May 2022. A remastered edition, also by Tantalus, was released for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February 2023. The game received favourable reviews from critics, and was a commercial success, with more than twelve million copies sold on all platforms as of June 2022.

A sequel, Cities: Skylines II, was released on 24 October 2023 to mixed reviews. The original game continued to receive updates.

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