People don't really need another city sim. But a lot of people want something in Kotlin to mess around with.
There are a few in the works but I don't think any "carry the torch" of the SC4-style game.
SimCity 4 has such staying power, new mods and lots are still being created to this day! It outlived SimCity 2013 by far.
Cities: Skylines, Banished, Citybound are all fun in their own right but I don't see any as a proper continuation of the SimCity series. (ignoring SC2013)
As a bonus you can play around in Kotlin too!
Interesting you say that, meanwhile Cities Skylines is the only city sim game I know of that's come out in the last 10 years that isn't ruined by EA or a shitware Farmville clone.
Why do you say that? There's not really a ton of them out there compared to RPGs, FPSs, etc.
You're probably right though. At the very least we could use more that aren't so traffic oriented. Maybe something with emphasis on pollution, agriculture, culture, utilities.
And Kotlin might be the future language for Android.
Java might be a little annoying to wield, but the JVM is actually quite nice.
Whomever at JetBrains put a premium on Java interop should get a medal, because it's a VERY low friction move to go from Java development to Kotlin. You can port your project one file at a time and the tooling is excellent.
I have dabbled with all major JVM languages, yet if it wasn't for Spark and now Android, no customer would allow us to use anything besides Java itself.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=java,kotlin,cloju...