Cities: Skylines gets first gameplay on Xbox One

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Come with me, because this one is for those who love building little cities: Cities: Skylines, one of the big names in city building and management, until then exclusive to PC, showed in March 2017 the first gameplay of its Xbox One version.

Created by Finnish studio Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, the game had come out on PC on March 10, 2015. The console version was handled by Tantalus Media, which adapted everything to be played with a controller, and was one of the ID@Xbox attractions at GDC 2017.

The premise is the same as on PC: you build and run your own city, zoning residential, commercial and industrial areas, laying out streets and avenues, handling taxes, public transport, safety and pollution. You can split the map into districts with their own rules, and traffic is a chapter of its own, because a poorly thought-out street quickly becomes a traffic jam. And, of course, you have to keep the population happy, which is my favorite kind of challenge.

A treat for console players: the Xbox One Edition already came with the Cities: Skylines – After Dark expansion, which adds the day and night cycle, nightlife and tourist attractions. A Windows 10 Edition with the same content was also announced.

What came next

The Xbox One Edition was released on April 21, 2017, on disc and digitally. The PS4 followed on August 15, 2017, and the Nintendo Switch on September 13, 2018. The success was huge: the game sold 250 thousand copies in the first 24 hours and reached 12 million copies across all platforms by June 2022, becoming the best-selling Finnish-developed game to date. The sequel, Cities: Skylines II, came out on October 24, 2023.