Back in August of 2025, the developer behind the massively popular American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 racked up a ton of attention by announcing that both games were coming to Xbox and PlayStation, but we haven't really heard much about the console versions since that original reveal.
It turns out there's a good reason for that — they're essentially rewriting huge chunks of the code. In a new "Road to Consoles Dev Talk" that was shared on YouTube over the weekend, SCS Software explained how the engine for these games has been in development for almost 30 years, and the "tiny little shortcuts" they've made during that time have led to a situation that requires "untangling" and "remedying" in order to launch on Xbox and PS5.
Here's a bit more about it:
"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..."
"This is one of the main reasons why it's taking us so long. There's an enormous amount of code and changes involved. Rewriting all of it is truly a superhuman task."
The video you see up above goes into significant detail about all of this, and unsurprisingly it doesn't conclude with any kind of release date for American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 on Xbox and PS5.
Honestly, we're not expecting to see ATS or ETS2 on Xbox Series X|S in 2026, but that doesn't mean the studio won't be working hard on it — and we appreciate that by the time they do appear on consoles, both games should be truly ready to hit the road for many years to come.
We'll leave you with a couple of final statements from the video update:
"My message to the people would be to just, you know, give us the time we're going to need, have patience with us because as always, we will not want to release anything unless we feel we have a good project to release."
"I think we have a history of keeping things under the lid until very close to the release... so that we don't disappoint our customers out there by saying a concrete release date maybe a year in advance or half a year in advance and then we have to postpone that. When it's ready, it's ready, and we will let you know."