After seeing this happen time and time again, it's kind of a wild decision to make. So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.

You would think a little more time would be put into reaching at least some reasonable performance level.

> 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...

Exactly, and what the other replies to your comment don't understand is that: a; they'll patch performance over time b; humans forget things very quickly, initial bad reviews don't matter.

Oh yeah, everyone remember the Panama papers? Yeah seems the public have forgotten about them a long time ago. What was done about em? Humans only remember some things.

yep, performance issues are just less important than functionality issues in the lead-up to a release. You can fix performance with a patch. It's hard to walk back "game crashes when I trigger the main menu"