30 Years of Shortcuts Now Haunt Truck Sim's Console Port

"We started with a codebase many years ago that simply wasn't designed to run across multiple processors at the same time... we realised that our technical debt had grown so massive that we were facing two possible routes: either completely rewrite everything from scratch, or try to move forward through smaller incremental changes."

That's SCS Software, the studio behind American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2, explaining in a new Road to Consoles Dev Talk why the console versions announced back in August 2025 still don't have a release date. The answer isn't some vague "we want to get it right" platitude. It's something far more specific and, frankly, more interesting: the engine powering both games has been in continuous development for almost 30 years, and the accumulated "tiny little shortcuts" made across those decades have calcified into a codebase that simply cannot run on console hardware without serious surgery.

I find this refreshingly honest. Most studios in this position would put out a 90-second trailer with a "coming soon" tag and go quiet. SCS instead published a detailed technical breakdown of why their single-threaded architecture is incompatible with how modern consoles expect games to distribute work across multiple CPU cores. They didn't sugarcoat it either, calling the rewrite "truly a superhuman task" and admitting this is "one of the main reasons why it's taking us so long."

The Single-Thread Problem

Here's why this matters beyond just Truck Sim. A lot of long-running PC games, especially simulation titles, were built in an era when squeezing performance out of one fast CPU core was the standard approach. Consoles like the Xbox Series X and PS5 are designed around distributing workloads across multiple cores simultaneously. When your engine has spent three decades assuming it only needs to talk to one processor at a time, porting isn't a matter of tweaking settings and shipping a build. You're retrofitting the foundation of a house while people are still living in it, because SCS is also maintaining and updating the live PC versions of both games.

SCS laid out their two options plainly: rewrite everything from scratch, or push through with smaller incremental changes. They chose the latter, which is the pragmatic call but also the slower one. A ground-up rewrite sounds cleaner in theory, but for a studio actively supporting two massive games with passionate PC communities, it would mean years of parallel development with no guarantee the new engine would feel the same. I think they made the right choice, even if it means console players are in for a longer wait than anyone hoped.

The studio was also blunt about their approach to release dates. "We have a history of keeping things under the lid until very close to the release," they said in the video, explicitly stating they won't commit to a date months in advance only to delay it later. A 2026 console launch looks unlikely at this point, and SCS seems comfortable with that reality rather than pretending otherwise.

What strikes me most is how this situation is a case study in what "technical debt" actually looks like at scale. Every developer accumulates it. Every codebase has shortcuts taken under deadline pressure or because the original scope didn't anticipate where the project would be a decade later. SCS just happens to have nearly 30 years of it stacked up, and a console port is the event that finally forces them to confront all of it at once. Studios that communicate this openly about their engineering challenges deserve credit for it; players can't make informed decisions about what to anticipate if all they get is silence. SCS gave their community a real answer, and the real answer is that American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 on Xbox and PS5 will ship when the code is actually ready to support them.