Cities: Skylines is being pirated, but Paradox has a plan
Cities: Skylines has done well enough that Paradox is seeing an uptick in piracy, but it knows how to fight that.
Cities: Skylines is making a lot of waves in the PC gaming community because it offers a kind of city building experience many fans expected from SimCity.
Paradox's Sham Jorjani said not everybody who has been attracted by this attention has been a paying customer.
Here are a few small tidbits of info about Cities: Skylines - day 1 we had 0% piracy. pretty cool. Day 2 16%.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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But Paradox knows how to fight piracy, because it's done it before.
As usual our plan for pirates is to make a great game even better through free updates - making it more convenient to use Steam instead.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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It's all about offering the superior service. That's how we bring down piracy. By making the paid experience a superior one.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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Paradox, like CD Projekt, seems to believe draconian DRM only drives more users to piracy. What you need to do is make paying for the game less of a hassle than pirating it.
Here is Paradox Interactive's and Princess Leia's stance on PC piracy:
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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It's all about offering a superior service. How come more and more use Netflix instead of pirating stuff? Ease of use and convenience.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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And this approach absolutely works.
We updated Magicka 14 times in 13 days. Even the pirates stopped posting new pirated versions after a while. Steams autoupdate was easier.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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Also - best "DRM" ever? Steam workshop.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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Despite the repeated success of generous responses to piracy, other games companies continue to build alternate DRM systems to rivet on top of Steam. Jorjani even made a crack about it:
Or....we could build our own ecosystem. Call it....P-play....or...Plorigins...or P-vapor or somesuch...yeah let's do that.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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Ha ha! Awesome. Cities: Skylines is available now - on Steam, obviously.
Thanks, DSO Gaming.
