9 Indie Video Games That SAVED Doomed Franchises
2. SimCity Became Cities Skylines
Will Wright created a masterpiece when he developed the first 'Sim' game - SimCity in back in 1989. Since then some version of SimCity has been on nearly every console manufactured. For me, personally, I spent many hours with the SNES version in my younger days - but I played plenty of the PC versions as well. The city management simulator eventually spawned numerous spin-off series including SimTower, Sim Safari, and of course - The Sims.
But thanks to EA's disastrous release of the 2013 version of the game, the whole series has mostly died out with only a mobile version of the game coming out a year later. Around this same time studio Colossal Order had been producing the Cities In Motion series, which centered on the player being a city's Transportation Head.
Colossal Order's publisher, Paradox, had refused to let them build a full city management game because of EA's dominance of the genre with SimCity. But after the aforementioned bungle in 2013 Paradox greenlit Cities: Skylines. One of the marketing points for Cities was that it was 'playable offline' a less-than-subtle jam at SimCity's problems caused by an 'always-online' anti-piracy measure.
In the end Cities: Skylines became Paradox's highest selling game, at the time, putting out over 250 thousand copies within a day of its release.