Colossal Order

Colossal Order is a Finnish video game developer known for its business simulation game series Cities in Motion and for its city-builder series Cities: Skylines. The company was founded in Tampere, Finland in 2009. The developer is closely linked to Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive, which tests, markets, sells, distributes, and owns the intellectual property of all games by Colossal Order. The CEO of Colossal Order is Mariina Hallikainen.

History
Colossal Order was founded in the summer of 2009 by a group of game developers of the mobile game company Universomo. Mariina Hallikainen was hired from outside of Universomo as the CEO of the new company.

At first, Colossal Order had difficulties obtaining funding for its first game, the business simulation game Cities in Motion, that was already in development when the company was founded. Investors thought that Cities in Motion would not attract a large enough clientele. Instead of big investors, the first steps of the company were funded by Finnish public instruments – Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment, Tekes, and DigiDemo finance of the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture – as well as small private investors.

In its early phase, the company was coached by the Yritystalli program of the Tampere University of Technology, but advice was sought directly from experienced Finnish game development companies as well, specifically Remedy Entertainment and Frozenbyte. Upon being founded, Colossal Order compared dozens of publishers and ended up signing a publishing agreement with Paradox Interactive after over a year's worth of negotiations.

In October 2015, Colossal Order was awarded the Finnish Game Developer of the Year (Vuoden suomalainen pelinkehittäjä) award at the convention. The judges thanked Colossal Order for focusing: "from its inception ... on – in addition to developing games – also developing its business model".

Games
The relationship between Colossal Order and its publisher Paradox Interactive has been characterized as constructive. Colossal Order has the freedom to create games without limitations set by the publisher, bar those on schedules.

Unlike the game developers that founded it, Colossal Order does not develop mobile games. Instead, the company focuses on PC games. Employees of the company have their own internal wiki platform for developing games. Games by Colossal Order are known for their active modding communities. One of the programmers at the company works full-time on modding tools.

The best-known game of the company is the city-building game Cities: Skylines published on March 10, 2015. It competes with games of the SimCity and Cities XL series. A total of 14 expansion packs, 22 content packs and 23 music packs were released for the game.

Cities: Skylines II was announced on March 6, 2023 and released on October 24, 2023 for Windows. Console versions of the game were delayed until Q2 2024.