Colossal Order

Colossal Order is a Finnish video game developer founded in 2009 in Tampere by a group of university friends with backgrounds in architecture and programming. The studio is best known for Cities: Skylines, the city-building game that effectively replaced SimCity as the genre standard when it launched in 2015, and its sequel Cities: Skylines 2, which had a troubled 2023 launch that became one of the more discussed publisher-developer friction stories in recent years. Colossal Order publishes its games through Paradox Interactive.

Cities in Motion

Before Cities: Skylines, Colossal Order released Cities in Motion in 2011 and Cities in Motion 2 in 2013, both transit management simulations focused on building public transportation networks in European cities. The games found a modest audience and gave the studio the technical foundation and publisher relationship with Paradox Interactive that enabled Cities: Skylines to happen. They are smaller in scope than what followed but worth knowing as the stepping stone that got the studio there.

Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines launched in March 2015 and sold over a million copies in its first week, filling a gap that EA’s troubled SimCity 2013 had left open. The game’s combination of deep zoning systems, traffic simulation, and robust mod support through the Steam Workshop made it the definitive modern city builder. Paradox and Colossal Order supported it with years of paid expansions covering natural disasters, parks, industries, airports, and more, building a catalog that kept the game commercially active for nearly a decade. It sold over twelve million copies across its lifetime and remains one of the best-selling city-building games ever made.

Cities: Skylines 2

Cities: Skylines 2 launched in October 2023 and did not go smoothly. The game released in a state that Colossal Order themselves acknowledged was below the performance targets they had aimed for, with significant frame rate and optimization problems on recommended hardware. Console versions planned for the same window were delayed to 2024. The modding tools that had been central to the original’s longevity were not available at launch. Paradox Interactive’s CEO stepped down partly in connection with broader company difficulties in the same period.

Colossal Order was transparent about the situation in a way that was unusual for a major release, publishing a detailed post-launch roadmap and acknowledging the problems directly rather than deflecting. The studio spent 2024 delivering performance patches and feature updates. The console versions eventually launched. By 2025 the game was in significantly better shape than at launch, though the initial reception had damaged its standing compared to the original. It remains the current platform for the Cities franchise and continues to receive content updates.

Studio Size and Independence

Colossal Order is a small studio by the standards of the games it makes, operating with a team of roughly 50 people. It has remained independent while publishing exclusively through Paradox Interactive, a relationship that dates to Cities in Motion. The Cities: Skylines 2 launch raised public questions about the pressures of that relationship and whether the game had been released before it was ready, questions neither party has fully answered in public. The studio continues to operate from Tampere.