The hottest city building on Steam in 2025 was actually supposed to take place in Cities: Skylines II, the unofficial successor to SimCity. But the city builder has been in major crisis since its launch in October 2023. The game is currently suffering from an aging population and too many corpses that are not being picked up. A hotfix should now solve the problem.
This is the situation: Cities: Skylines II was released in October 2023 and there was actually a lot of hype surrounding the game, as the first part is considered a milestone in the genre. At its peak, 75,549 players were online on Steam at the same time.
But the release was a disaster for publisher Paradaox Interactive and players ran away from the game. Even the developers seemed to warn against the game. Cities: Skylines II was generally considered an “unfinished impudence” – to this day it still has a lousy 53% positive reviews on Steam.
The first DLCs were panned and are considered “the worst titles on Steam” ever. The general mood was: The developers should fix their game before releasing new content and taking money for it.
Most recently, Part 1 had more players on Steam than Part 2. But they now want to address the problems.
The release trailer for the building game Cities: Skylines 2
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This is a big problem: As you play Cities: Skylines II for longer, the city’s residents grow old and retire.
But then there is no one there who is still working and the saved games become unplayable. In addition, picking up dead residents doesn’t really work; corpses clog up the cities.
Hotfix revives tired old people and removes corpses
What do you want to change now? With a new update, the hotfix 1.2.3f1, all pensioners will be significantly younger again (via steam).
The maximum age is limited to 120 in-game days.
In save games with too many dead people who have not yet been picked up by the hearse, the bodies will be removed.
The developers say: The update should also ensure that people now die at appropriate times.
Developers expect unemployment to skyrocket
Could there be problems? The developers say:
If you start a game with the update, there could be a spike in unemployment, then the number of pensioners drops sharply and suddenly there are more workers again.
But if the game goes on for a while, everything should settle back down to more “reasonable levels”. Well, if only the problems in the real world could be solved with an update. You can find a city builder on Steam that we can thoroughly recommend to you here: I spent 50 hours in 4 days with a game on Steam – no city building game has affected me like this in 30 years