Cities Skylines 2 failed because of Unity? Is this true?
TL;DR: Colossal Order shipped Cities Skylines 2 in October 2023, just four months after Unity DOTS 1.0 left experimental. They built production tech on an unfinished stack, then gave citizens 20,000-polygon teeth rendered off-camera. My take: the engine did not fail Colossal Order, Colossal Order failed by betting on tech that was not ready.
I stumbled upon a PC Gamer article about how Cities Skylines 2 didn't deliver because Unity underperformed. I was not buying it, because I worked in Unity for many years. So I decided to investigate what was going on behind the scenes and who was actually responsible for the failure.
What did happen to Cities: Skylines 2?
Back in late 2023, Cities: Skylines 2 was released, and public reaction was negative because the game was riddled with bugs and performance issues. Cities: Skylines, the original, was a well-respected game, a perfect alternative to Sim City 5, which EA failed to deliver. So the studio behind Cities: Skylines 2 Colossal Order was seen as a savior of the city-building genre.
With such a reputation, the studio was overconfident in what it could do. Just the week before the release, they openly admitted that they were not satisfied with the game's performance.
Just a week before the release of Cities: Skylines 2, developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive have issued a warning to fans about the city builder's performance.
You can find the full article here
Unity D.O.T.S
When the game development started, Unity's D.O.T.S was still in an experimental stage. So the majority of the time spent on development was with using technology that was not even ready for production. They were building on a promise, and this was an error on their end because their team failed to foresee the technical capabilities of such technology.
I remember back at that time, D.O.T.S. was never recommended for real production projects, it was just used as an experiment of what Unity could be in the future.
I found out that D.O.T.S 1.0 was released in June 2023, while the game was released in October of the same year. And if you connect the dots, it is obvious whose fault it was.
20k polygon single citizen teeth
In this Reddit post a user u/Wide_Signature1153 said
Its easy to blame the engine, but lets not forget that things like the teeth in citizens had more triangles than nier automata's butt
At first, I thought it was some sort of joke, because there is no way any professional developer would make a mistake like that. Even complete beginners know that a game like Skylines doesn't need perfect models with high poly count, because the player does not play the game at such close distance. And even if they did, a developer ought to implement a proper LOD system.
Then, by some Googling, I found this Reddit post from user u/Hexcoder0. He found out that individual citizen teeth have 20k polygons and no LOD optimization implemented at all.
How can this be a Unity mistake? The more I dig, the funnier it gets.
The "Dog-pocalypse"
Infinite bugs
The game is contested with countless bugs, and many are funny. I didn't follow the game release when it was actual in 2023, so I am discovering these things just now, and I really enjoyed writing this article.
Here are more funny posts by reddit users
City of 65K population. The number of pedestrians is insane.
Now imagine 65k citizens with perfect 20k polygon teeth :D
Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order departure
In late 2025 parted ways, and a new studio, Iceflake Studios, took over. This alone speaks to whose fault it was. In my personal opinion, Colossal Order was overconfident in its capabilities because of the previous success.
In early 2026, Paradox Interactive handed the franchise to a new studio.
Learn what Unity DOTS is here What is Unity DOTS? Is Unity DOTS worth learning in 2026?
