Cities: Skylines 2 devs designed the game to target 30 fps because 'there's no real benefit to aim for higher'

pcgamer.com:

In a recent Reddit AMA, the team behind Cities: Skylines 2, fielded a host of questions from the gaming community. Amongst all of its responses was a comment by Colossal Order's Chief Technical Officer, saying that the game was made with a performance target of 30 fps. Why? Because the developers don't believe there would be a long-term benefit in pushing it up to 60.

As a sequel to the immensely popular Cities: Skylines, fans undoubtedly expected the game to have better graphics and more expansive cityscapes to build and manage. Possibly what they weren't expecting was for the game to be extremely demanding on PC hardware, to the point that a mega-expensive machine would struggle.

The folks over at IGN spotted the specific comment by the CTO and it's only fair to highlight exactly what they said:

'The target is 30fps because of the nature of the game, (arguably) there are no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city with inevitably become CPU bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters, and have responsive UI.'

They went on to clarify this a little more with:

'For that reason, our simulation is also built around an expected update rate given 30fps. However, it does not hurt to get 60 fps as it can contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects so while our target is 30fps, we don't intend on limiting or stopping the optimization work just because we reach it on recommended hardware, we just don't believe there would be a long term benefit in setting the target to 60fps, especially because we face rendering challenges both from close up and far distances.'

The gist of the argument is that Cities: Skyline 2 is a next-gen