> So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.
Unfortunately, negative publicity from bad performance doesn't really stop these games from selling well, as proven by most AAA releases in the past few years.
Skylines isn't an AAA release though. And the first game was only really successful because the prior sim city was full of user hostile changes. The new game similarly banks on the accumulated positive image of the first one. To risk all that with a user hostile, awfully optimized early release is a risky game to play.
The studio already killed a series once with a bad second entry, cities in motion 2...
Unfortunately, negative publicity from bad performance doesn't really stop these games from selling well, as proven by most AAA releases in the past few years.