Cities: Skylines is a 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. Players work to maintain various elements of the city, including its
budget, health, employment, and pollution levels. Players are also able to maintain a city in a
sandbox mode, which provides unrestricted 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 the developers felt
they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox
held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the
2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title. The developer'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 has 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 in March
2015, with ports to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles being released in 2017 and
for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018 developed by Tantalus Media. The game received
favourable reviews from critics, and was a commercial success, with more than five million
copies sold on the PC platforms alone as of March 2018.