Games publisher Paradox Interactive has re-iterated its commitment to anti-piracy measures which focus on rewarding paying customers rather than penalising those who access their wares for free (and making life harder for legit owners at the same time).
Its latest city-builder game, Cities: Skylines came out last week, and instead of attaching a proprietary client or insisting that the game be always-online – measures implemented by other publishers – Paradox’s Sham Jorjani had this to say on Twitter:
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 a stance echoed by Polish developer CD Projeckt, the studio behind The Witcher franchise and the owner of Good Old Games (a web shop that sells DRM-free older games), but unfortunately for gamers the view is in the minority among big-name publishers.
Paradox has taken a similar approach to its other games, like Magicka:
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
Jorjani also took a swipe at publishers that still believe in making paying customers jump through hoops:
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
Paradox’s plans for Cities: Skylines (which has over 4 600 positive reviews so far on Steam) include both paid-for and free downloadable content over the life of the title, delivered automatically and conveniently via Steam.
While Steam is DRM of a sort, it gives Skylines “Steam Workshop” support, a feature that allows people to make mods for the game and share them with other Skylines enthusiasts quickly and easily over and above the planned free updates. Jorjani’s thoughts on it:
Also – best “DRM” ever? Steam workshop. — Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) March 12, 2015
All that aside, many players have left Steam reviews saying how Skylines is what Sim City 5 could have been had EA not decided to go the always-on, forced-interaction route they went with 2013’s SimCity.
Since Skylines is currently the top-selling game on Steam (and sold over 250 000 copies within the first 24 hours of being on sale), Paradox is clearly onto something both in terms of its city-builder design and anti-piracy approach.
Should you have been burned by 2013’s SimCity (and who wasn’t?), you should definitely consider checking out Cities: Skylines. It’s available now and goes for $29.99 (R372.93) on Steam.