For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.
So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.
Part of me feels like it ended up similar to the situation Ark is in now where the player base is split. I’ve honestly not heard anything much about CS2 recently which is curious. It was a shame it was such a let down on release after how much love CS got.
“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “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’s a very good idea and much better than the stupidity of the current real estate market where all over the world entire generations cannot ever afford housing.