Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?
Cities skylines 2 was way more ambitious than the first game but they barely scaled up the size of the studio over the years and then pushed out a half baked product. I remember they tried to play the scrappy indie studio in defense of the games state at launch as if they hadn’t released the most popular city builder of the last like 15 years and oodles of DLC since along with niche hits in the City in Motion games
And they started pushing out paid DLCs before most of the issues were fixed. Pure greed.