The long game of Cities: Skylines is not wealth or size, but roads. The bigger a city becomes, the more disaster prone its traffic system is. Unsurprisingly, mods have made this a major focus. Traffic Report Tool is a great place to start, because while it can’t fix anything itself, it can show you what’s wrong.
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.
Subscribe to the VG247 newsletterGet all the best bits of VG247 delivered to your inbox every Friday!Enable JavaScript to sign up to our newsletter
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
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
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
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: pic.twitter.com/fDmDgfHHLp
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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
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
Also – best 'DRM' ever? Steam workshop.
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
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
Ha ha! Awesome. Cities: Skylines is available now – on Steam, obviously.
Thanks, DSO Gaming.
Posted by2 years ago
Archived
Traffic manager President Edition is really, really good
I mean, wow. I'm sure I'm the last person to find this out, but I finally added it to my game today. I just had to say something, it's amazing. Trucks using lanes that make sense, significantly improved control of roads (you have no idea how often I'd accidentally draw a one-way road the wrong direction and have to start over), services reaching their destinations on time...
It's almost too good! Such a weird feeling to look at my little city and not see piles of complaints everywhere.
97% Upvoted