Cities: Skylines 2 devs are struggling to get the game running on consoles

In the wake of the downfall of EA’s SimCity series, Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive released Cities: Skylines in 2015 to universal praise. Unfortunately, last year’s sequel suffers from a number of issues – even a year after launch. While the PC version is in a somewhat better state than it was at release, it seems the team aren’t any closer to getting the previously-delayed console versions ready.

As part of the game’s most recent set of patch notes on Steam, the Cities: Skylines Team shared an update on their current progress towards releasing the console version of Skylines 2, saying:

“While we do not have a new release date for the console version yet, we want to keep you up to date on our progress and our challenges,” adding that “Currently, we are experiencing both simulation issues (CPU) and graphics issues (GPU) which become noticeable when players take certain actions that cause frame rate drops or memory overload. These issues are particularly challenging due to the hardware limitations of consoles.”

They continued, “At this point, we have managed to get the game to a stable and playable state by significantly lowering the graphics quality. However that's to the level where it becomes a compromise that we are not willing to make. Once we get it to an acceptable level, further optimizations are needed for both simulation and memory usage before we are ready to share the console version.”

The team concluded by stating “Until they are resolved, we cannot provide a release estimate to avoid it being premature and potentially misleading. The console release remains a top priority for us, we have multiple solutions being explored with experts actively involved, and we're working hard to bring you the console version of Cities: Skylines II.”

As mentioned, the team have struggled to get Cities: Skylines 2 running correctly on console for a while now, with the game being delayed from its most recent October 2024 date to sometime during “the 2025 calendar.”

While we have seen some devs struggle with optimisation on consoles (in particular with the Xbox Series S), the current PC version of Cities: Skylines 2 seems to indicate that the issues run much deeper. Hopefully the game is able to reach a stable point on consoles eventually.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Cities: Skylines 2 on PC? Is the game beyond saving? Will the PS5/Series versions come out next year? Let us know down below.

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