from Hacker News

Rent in Cities Skylines 2 was too high, so the devs removed landlords

by sam_bristow on 6/13/24, 8:18 PM with 92 comments

• by Animats on 6/13/24, 10:38 PM

  Second Life has this problem in a big way. There are major landlords keeping properties in good areas off the market or setting very high prices on them to drive rents up. It's working, too. Any good property that comes up for sale at a low price is snapped up by a big landlord and the price raised.

  Cheap land is available, but it's going to be on a rocky plateau or behind a truck stop or something.

• by legitster on 6/13/24, 8:36 PM

  The actual blog post is not so polemic: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/41450796...

  "That means that even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption."

  It sounds like the "virtual landlord" was mostly about allocating maintenance costs, and the actual fixes are a) hide the notifications more often b) make citizens spend less on food and c) let buildings deteriorate more rapidly.

  Not sure if I would want any strong takeaways from this.

• by Tiktaalik on 6/14/24, 12:36 AM

  Here's the equation:

  Rent = (LandValue + (ZoneType * Building Level)) * LotSize * SpaceMultiplier

  Basically rent never goes down unless land value decreases.

  IRL Land Value basically always goes up (barring external events...) but you can help stagnate rents to at or below inflation by subdividing the land value. So the question is like is there a mechanism in the game for that? Doesn't look like it here in this equation (ie. no divisor) but maybe LandValue is modified elsewhere and at the Rent per Person equation the LandValue has already been divided by some amount.

  (edit: unless lotsize is the mechanism by which they're creating subdivision/apartments? )

  This seems like a weird equation in that land value doesn't have a close relationship to zone type? That seems unaligned with reality, but maybe zoning impacts land value elsewhere via another equation.

• by Sohcahtoa82 on 6/13/24, 11:55 PM

  I played CS2 for about a month at release. It was pretty broken, but playable if you didn't mind the performance issues.

  But the "high rent" problem drove me bonkers. You can specifically zone low-rent housing. But it didn't matter. They would live in houses and complain of high rent rather than move into the affordable denser housing across the street.

  The real question, IMO, is why does all housing in CS2 seem to be rented?

• by Bjorkbat on 6/13/24, 11:00 PM

  Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. On top of that, communism was overpowered to the point where the middle class (and sometimes lower class) in communist countries were materially better-off than the upper class in non-communist countries (https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/).

  God I love Paradox Interactive. They aren't even trying to radicalize gamers against rent-seeking capitalism. They're just putting out games with complex simulations under the hood and inadvertently discovering that landlords ruin the game.

• by ajsnigrutin on 6/13/24, 8:24 PM

  > It was getting so bad, people were actually suggesting building more homes.

  This sounds like some where suprised by that... of course we need more housing, if there are more houses than people who need the, the landlords will have to fight to keep renters in, to at last get some of the money.

  Somehow, back in communist times over here, we managed to build a lot... both the government, that built large apartment buildings, and also people themselves, that were allowed to build single family houses a lot easier than now, and they did that mostly by themselves and with help from friends. Housing wasn't an issue.

  And now, we act as if we're incapable of building anything anymore... no new neighbourhoods, no new schools, no new infrastructure projects... no nothing.

• by more_corn on 6/14/24, 1:23 AM

  So… eat the rich?