A lot is going on for Cities: Skylines' 10th anniversary—from freebies to new creator packs—but there's still a big ol' elephant in the room

It's Old Father Time here—big beard, robes, clock fetish—spreading the harrowing news that Cities: Skylines is already a whole decade old. 2015 was, it turns out, actually quite a while ago, and not just the other day. Awful stuff.

Naturally, Paradox and Colossal Order are not letting this milestone pass without notice. A celebration is kicking off, across both games, featuring updates, freebies, free trials and new releases. Lovely stuff.

Here's everything that's coming to Cities: Skylines 2:

• Anniversary patch – March 18
• Dragon Gate creator pack – March 18
• Leisure Venues creator pack – March 18
• Mediterranean Heritage creator pack – March 18
• Atmospheric Piano radio station – March 18
• Jade Road radio station – March 18
• Feelgood Funk radio station – March 18
• Free weekend – March 20-24

And here's what the original Cities: Skylines is getting:

• Anniversary patch – March 25
• Emerging Downtown creator pack – March 25
• Countryside creator pack – March 25
• Harvest Harmony radio station – March 25
• Free weekend – March 20-24

The anniversary patches will give you a bunch of free parks and buildings to play around with. In Cities: Skylines 2, they are themed around the series' birthday, and in Cities: Skylines you'll get dynamic parks that change to reflect all the expansions you've added to your library.

If you own the Cities: Skylines 2 Ultimate Edition, you'll also get the creator packs and radio stations for free; for everyone else they'll be available for purchase individually or as a bundle.

On March 13, Paradox is also expanding its subscription service, which it's been using in its grand strategy games. In this case, it'll allow subscribers to play with every piece of DLC for a monthly fee. If you already own some, there will be a "special completion offer" to help you round out your collection.

Paradox and Colossal Order have plenty to celebrate. Prior to Cities: Skylines, the venerable city-building genre was in rough shape, especially when it came to modern city building. 2013's SimCity was a disaster that effectively killed the series (outside of mobile spin-offs) and there wasn't an obvious candidate to pick up the torch. Up until that point, Colossal Order was the developer of a good but niche transport sim, Cities in Motion.

I've chatted to various members of Colossal Order and Paradox about the game's success over the years, and often they present it as a spot of luck: right place, right time. There was hunger for a SimCity successor, and Cities: Skylines facilitated that. But that sells the original game short. It was a lot more granular than SimCity, with a much stronger focus on the simulation side, and critically it struck gold by giving players so much freedom to create their own mods and assets.

Before Cities: Skylines was even out the door, the modders had been tinkering away. So when it launched on Steam, the Workshop already had pages and pages of new assets and tweaks. Before too long, people were recreating real-world cities or crafting their own cyberpunk dystopias. It was everything a city builder needed to be.

Of course, this 10th anniversary celebration is kicking off under the shadow of Cities: Skylines 2. A massive disappointment no matter how you look at it. It's in a much better state now than it was when it launched in 2023—as you'd certainly hope—but players continue to criticise its stability, optimisation issues and wonky systems.

For me, the greatest disappointment was the absence of modding tools: the thing that was so critical to the first game's success. Not including them at launch struck me as a huge risk, but I never would have imagined we'd still be waiting for important features like an asset editor more than a year later.

Only last week, on the cusp of the anniversary, Colossal Order apologetically announced that progress on the asset editor was not going smoothly. "The implementation of the Asset Editor has proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated due to the hefty amounts of built-in assets affected by the changes, but it is moving forward," it said.

So it's a bitter-sweet anniversary. Cities: Skylines is one of the greatest city builders ever made, but the sequel has been bouncing from problem to problem since 2023. Still, some freebies are nice.