Why porting American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 to console is a “superhuman task”

• ATS and ETS 2 console versions face huge technical challenges
• Release date still to be confirmed

SCS Software’s first behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing work with its Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator console versions was released in October last year, with the Czech developer stating that the games would not see the light of day in 2025.

Hopes from the community turned to a 2026 release, but the studio’s second ‘Road To Consoles Dev Talk’ vlog has even cast doubt on this, with the team explaining the difficulties it is experiencing with porting the game from PC.

“This has obviously been caused by the engine being in development for almost 30 years”, stated Jakub Mráz, Consoles Producer at SCS Software, referring to SCS’s proprietary Prism3D game engine.

“It’s served it spurpose at the time, but throughout all these years you make tiny little shortcuts in development because you need to ship continent, you need to ship the titles, you need to get it out to the market, and, as it turns out, if you do these little shortcuts here and there after 30 years it kind of adds up,” he continued, explaining the intricacies of working with ATS and ETS 2’s ageing tech.

Prism 3D technical issues

Prism 3D was first used in 2000’s Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter 3, and has appeared in titles as diverse as Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project and Shark! Hunting the Great White in the following years. However, it has really found its home within SCS’s range of truck sim titles, including those in the 18 Wheels of Steel series.

“Untangling and remedying these situations is taking quite some time, and we want to do it correctly; we don’t want to rush things, we don’t want to release a half-baked product,”  Mráz continued.

“We want people to enjoy our games for years to come on all the platforms. With great expectations comes a lot of work, and we are trying to fulfil all these expectations,” he concluded, citing the studio’s determination to ship polished products to consoles.

CPU bottleneck

“We started a code base many years ago that simply wasn’t designed to run across multiple processors at the same time,” stated SCS’s co-owner and Rendering Programmer, Petr Šebor.

“We realised that our technical debt had grown so massive that we were facing two possible routes: either rewrite everything from scratch or try to move forward through smaller, incremental changes that would keep the game alive and operational so it could continue running for end users,” he explained.

Some of these back-end changes have already borne fruit, with SCS introducing HDR support, overhauled physics, and new cargo systems, with work well underway on their new Coach and road car driving modes. Players can also expect to see the usual array of map refreshes and DLCs added in a timely fashion.

“Step by step, these changes will gradually take us toward the goal we’re aiming for. This is one of the main reasons it’s taking us so long: there’s an enormous amount of code and changes involved.

“Rewriting all of it is a superhuman task,” he added. 

“Our games are mainly CPU-bound,” countered Mráz. “That means the processor is kind of the bottleneck of the performance. 

“We are very well aware of that… but obviously now with the introduction of the new platforms [PS5 and Series X|S], which benefit greatly from having better CPU optimisations, we are working very hard on the architecture of the engine, untangling old code, basically bringing our engine up to modern standards.”

Regardless, progress appears positive, with SCS exhibiting ETS 2 at the Poznań Game Arena in 2025 on an early base PS5 build.

“That was pretty heartwarming to see that people have enjoyed it so much, and they liked what they saw so much that they confused it with the PC version,” he said.

American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 console release date

The real question players want to know the answer to, however, is ‘When will American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S?’.

Well, unfortunately, SCS remains coy on the matter.

“My message to the players will be to 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,” stated SCS’s head of PR and Marketing, Nemiro.

“When it’s ready, it’s ready, and we’ll let you know when,” agreed Mráz.

“[In] the upcoming several months, we will be rolling out updates on several fronts of the game, touching on UI (user interface), UX (user experience), screen flow, remedying some of the old mishaps, cleaning up a lot of the interface, making it a bit more modern, modular,” he explained.

“And, obviously, there are things we have not announced yet, and one of them, the big secret that we’re not quite ready to reveal yet, will be in regards to audio, so stay tuned for that”.

So, no firm release date was given, and considering the studio’s plan to release updates over the next ‘several months’, the console ports appear to be sliding towards 2027 rather than this year.

However, there’s one final intriguing point left to discuss…

Nintendo Switch 2 port considerations

“It’s true that the future or maybe even the current trends are obviously circling around handhelds,” continued Mráz, raising the possibility that SCS’s truck sims could eventually be ported to the Nintendo Switch 2 (both games can already be used on Steam Deck).

“You’ve got all these different devices available on the market: we are looking at performance, playability, readability, accessibility for handheld devices, because it seems that the future, in a not-such-small manner, lies in the handheld market. 

“And our game being the way it is, it makes sense to try and do our best to satisfy the needs of the players that would like to play our games maybe on the travel or on the couch… Handheld gaming is also something we’re looking into and adjusting some of the things we are doing for the console development,” said Mráz.

Even if a firm release date for the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of ATS and ETS 2 still seems many months away, SCS’s determination to create a worthy console experience is admirable, with a Switch 2 port a realistic stretch goal for the future.

*Petr Šebor’s quotes were used directly from YouTube’s autogenerated and autotranslated captions

Source: SCS Software