Cities: Skylines
Profile updated
Simulation-focused city building defines Cities: Skylines, a 2015 indie game from developer Colossal Order. Published by Paradox Interactive, it launched at $29.99 and has 217,712 Steam reviews with 93% positive sentiment.
Overview
Cities: Skylines is a 2015 Simulation game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. On Steam it has gathered 217,767 player reviews, 93% of them positive, which counts as a very positive reception among indie titles in the Simulation category. The game is available on linux, mac, windows, and launched at $30. The pairing of developer Colossal Order with publisher Paradox Interactive is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Simulation projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 12.4 million to 29.0 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, Cities: Skylines can be compared against similar Simulation titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
217,767
Positive
93%
Steam appid
255710
Engine
Unknown
Sales estimate
vv1.012.4M to 29.0M
units (median: 20.7M)
≈ $212.6M to $496.1M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2015 | +30 |
| price_$30 | +5 |
| positive_93% | +10 |
| final NB | 95 |
Confidence range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use a multi-factor Boxleiter method against public Steam review counts.
They are not authoritative sales data. Actual sales can deviate by
±50% in either direction. Free-to-play games, deeply discounted titles, and games
with heavy bundle distribution have larger error margins. Algorithm version
v1.0.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Cities: Skylines at roughly 12.4 million to 29.0 million copies, with a median around 20.7 million, derived from its 217,767 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $354.4M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
90d · low $20.74Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $20.74 to $29.99, averaging $28.87 across 3 discount windows, with a historical low of $20.74 on 2026-05-08.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosure- Steam reference -70%$8.99 Buy
- Fanatical -10%$29.15 Buy
- Green Man Gaming$29.99 Buy
- Humble Store$29.99 Buy
- GOG.com
Live prices from public feeds, cheapest first. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
linuxmacwindows
Genres
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Cities: Skylines sold?
- indielist estimates Cities: Skylines has sold between 12,412,719 and 28,963,011 units (median 20,687,865), derived from its 217,767 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Cities: Skylines?
- Cities: Skylines was developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive.
- When was Cities: Skylines released?
- Cities: Skylines was released in 2015.
- How many reviews does Cities: Skylines have on Steam?
- Cities: Skylines has 217,767 Steam reviews, of which 93% are positive.
Ecosystem
indielist positions Cities: Skylines within the Simulation segment so players can surface comparable titles by shared tags and genre rather than by storefront promotion. On the developer side, Colossal Order's other releases and Paradox Interactive's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Cities: Skylines sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same Cities: Skylines page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Simulation game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.