How players talk about disastrous game launches: What went wrong with Cities: Skylines II?

Cities: Skylines (Colossal Order, 2015) took the city-builder throne from Maxis’ SimCity series (1989–2014) after the disastrous launch of the fifth SimCity (Maxis Emeryville, 2013). But history may be repeating itself, as developers Colossal Order and publishers Paradox Interactive are facing a backlash to the launch of the hotly anticipated Cities: Skylines II (2023).

While studies have been conducted into games which had poor launches, like No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016; see Chien et al., 2020) and Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020; see Siuda et al., 2023), these focus on the games’ celebrated turnarounds, rather than on the period of the launch itself. The extensive cost of game development means a single failure can be catastrophic, as evidenced by SimCity developer Maxis Emeryville being shut down as a consequence of the poor launch. Yet these events seem to be becoming an increasingly common occurrence.

Here, I analyse a snapshot of player reaction and discourse to Cities II’s launch. 30 threads have been scraped from the subreddit /r/CitiesSkylines2 and coded using an open coding approach based on grounded theory (Gibbs, 2018, p. 67) to build a picture of themes of player speculation regarding why the launch was poor.