Cities: Skylines is the best selling title for Paradox Interactive and Shams Jorjani – VP of Acquisition at Paradox – revealed how the company will fight back piracy, as well as the percentage of pirated copies for Cities: Skylines these first two days.
As Shams said, Paradox will simply have to make a great game even better through free updates. Shams believes that this will make it more convenient to use Steam instead of downloading a pirated version of the game.
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
Shams believes that frequent updates will make the paid version more attractive and a superior product to the pirated one.
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
Now most of you will say that pirates will go ahead and crack each and every update of Cities: Skylines, right? Well, not exactly. Paradox experimented with this idea in Magicka. And as Shams revealed, pirates stopped posting new pirated version of Magicka after a while.
Lastly, Shams revealed that on its first day there weren’t any pirated copies of Cities: Skylines. On its second day, however, Paradox had 16% piracy.
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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Sad this game is easily worth the money
It’s still top seller on Steam right now.
Don’t worry about them.
And they’re being very well rewarded for it. I hope that those who pirate it do it out of need and not greed. Developers like these deserve support from the gaming community.
But I cannot blame those who pirate it because they can’t get it otherwise. It just makes me sad.
Why is it sad? Do you have any evidence that anyone who pirated it would have bought a copy if it hadn’t been available?
No I’m just hoping if they could afford it they buy it and read my comment above I’m not a pirate hater if the game is bad or mediocre
and do you have any evidence that a single person who pirated it could have afforded it? The only time piracy is sad is when the person who downloads it both has the money and would have bought it if the game couldn’t have been pirated. Until now, not a single study has ever proven both of those things to be true about a single downloader.
Got a captain hindsight here.
Do you have any evidence that every single pirate is either destitute or using it as a demo and would buy it if it turns out they like it?
No? Go figure.
The burden is on those claiming “lost sales” to in fact prove they are lost sales. Pirates have already proven they aren’t interested in giving the company money and that they aren’t doing damage to the company (they take nothing that is not in infinite supply and that uses none of the companies resources)
ubi
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_4vvRqUgAAo_QK.jpg:large
16% of piracy means the other 84% copies are legal?
No, if you add the day 1 piracy “0” to the day two piracy of 16%, it means the game has a piracy rate of 160%.
You can trust me on this one, I work for Ubisoft.
Not sure if trolling or am I missing serious math skills.
You add a zero to 16% and it magically becomes 160%. So on every legit copy there are 1.6 pirated copies?!
Check your sarcasm detector
i wasn’t sure, thanks 😀
LOL. Good one…
You can bet that a lot of those 16% have already bought the game.
great price, great game,days of content,great community, great support, this is how you fight piracy and it’s a damn good fight. i hope it sells millions of copies
I torrent some games i’m not going to lie and act like i don’t BUT when a game like this comes up i know i’ll be playing it for years and almost at least once a month. I have to buy it and i also in a way feel sad if i get it for nothing when they really did a good job with only 9 people(from the beginning).
Again i know people don’t like it when we torrent games to me i feel like its renting a game for free since i know i’ll buy it down the road unless its crap or mediocre.
nice to hear that your going to buy it. i don’t judge people but i understand the situation. most of the time i will wait after a week sometimes months to buy a game (wolf,mordor etc). only games i buy on release date are these kind of games (door kickers,cities,divinity) and witcher which i was pre ordered last year and it will be my last pre ordered game forever. why not wait for price to go down ? i mean i bough wolf half the price. good thing about cities is the price is just right.
I admittedly pirated this game just to see if my PC can handle it, luckily it can on lower settings, I’m making a steam account to buy it as I type this. I think this game will do just fine in the sales department.Also I don’t think they should count a pirated version as a sale lose , because theres no guarantee the person who pirated would have bought it if it wasn’t pirate-able.
The Mod community is incredible.
I am with you. GOOD games, I buy those. Other games that are anything but high quality, I have no shame and will admit to pirating them(In your face crappy developers and publishers, I will rub that in your face all day every day). Skylines is in my legit Steam library right now accompanied by only one other game, Skyrim. The only two high quality games worth MY money in the last 3 or 4 years.
I actually preordered Skylines. That goes against everything I have come to believe but for this game, due to the communication between the Dev. team and the customers, I was actually able to make an informed purchase knowing full well what I was buying. Now that is a rare thing in the gaming world. I do not think I have ever seen anything like it in modern times.
The patch is currently having a few issues, I hope they get it sorted out soon though, I really need to move on to something new, as a customer I have little or no patience for messed up product, as is probably evident in my behavior.
The problem with PC gaming is because of piracy. That’s what killing PC gaming to be very honest. Now with less than $400 you have few bundled AAA games EXCLUSIVE for consoles (PC will never get it) and 99.9% PC games will be on consoles. Everyone are focusing on consoles. Valve, Nvidia, Amazon, etc. PC gaming is in danger.
Try harder.
Well it made me laugh anyways.
Sure. Le’s go with that.
Console fanboy detected.
LOL! Stop with these mushrooms, RETARD!!
99.9% of pc games will come to consoles?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
99.9% of the over 18000 games that consoles already don’t have (with more to follow). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_gaming_platforms
How many PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of GTA V were on torrent sites the day after the game was released?
Oh, that’s right, dozens…
By your logic, console gaming must be dying as well.
The game was pirated nearly a week before release on consoles.
you are genuinely funny archaven. the person who made the rogero hack for the ps3 might wanna have a talk with you. or the person which jailbroke the ps4. or the persons who host all the isos for pirated xbox games. or the statisticians that discovered that a. pracy is more of an issue on consoles than on PC b. PC developers expect higher profit margins on average c. the used games market hurts developers as much as piracy – they dont get a single cent from the turnover, also they dont need to acquire stupid licenses from sony or microsoft to develop games on the clearly superior system: PC
also PC gaming did broke the total value.of both console and mobile gaming combined in 2013 and is growing steadily. sorry to burst your bubble.
Are you dumb?
The PC library is in the 100’s of thousands of titles. at least 99.9999% of those will never be on a console.
“That’s what killing PC gaming to be very honest”
Pc gaming makes more money than all consoles combined, has more exlsuives than all consoles combined, more developers put their games on pc than ever before.
But pc gaming is dying.
???????
I dont, i dont even know anymore.
“Now with less than $400 you have few bundled AAA games EXCLUSIVE for consoles”
Aside from the fact the new consoles barelly got any exlusives id like to see this deal because i highly doubt i could get a console for 400$ with multiple AAA exlusive games.
“. Everyone are focusing on consoles”
Yeah its not like valve is killing it and even microsoft is going after pc nor that steam is increasing by 50% every year and over 50% of developers focus on pc and mobile with 27% on consoles
Consoles are in danger.
I’m glad this game is doing well financially and also received well by critics. They are right that giving superior version than pirated version attract more people but I’m not so sure about updating the game everyday.
“Shams revealed that on its first day there weren’t any pirated copies of
Cities: Skylines. On its second day, however, Paradox had 16% piracy.”
That’s a lie, it was cracked and put online within 15 minutes of it going live on Steam (4:15PM GMT)
True. It was instantly “cracked” when it became available on Steam. And Magicka was updated (cracked) constantly up to July 2011, sometimes even on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, it’s a very good strategy by Paradox as long as the updates remain necessary and/or provide new content for the game. Just spamming useless updates wouldn’t be much of a solution on the long term.
What I find most interesting is the fact that they offer this decent game (judging by reviews) for 30 €, when others start at 60 € for standard editions. You can even find legit (no vpn or ru) steam keys starting at 22 €. There is really no point anymore pirating at that price.
the only problem is, if this works(patching everyday), more companies will release even more broken games on release, and then patch it everyday, which is not a bad thing, but they will be patching it for weeks. sure it “may” bring down piracy for a bit. but do you really still wanna see bugs in the game after a few weeks?
were gonna have lots of intentionally broken games = not good
Starting price of 30€ is quite nice, it will bring them more customers, but not many people have 30€ to spend on the game to begin with, let alone 60€
“There is really no point anymore pirating at that price.” meaning that this statement isnt quite true
I think the idea here is to add additional content with updates.
Besides, whether you release a small patch every day for the first two weeks after release or one patch a day after release and a relatively big patch two weeks later doesn’t really make a difference – if anything, it’s better for the customer; when you “collect” bug fixes to release one big patch, chances are that there are people who can’t play the game for two weeks. If you keep releasing minor updates, more and more people will be able to play it.
“chances are that there are people who can’t play the game for two weeks. If you keep releasing minor updates, more and more people will be able to play it.”
wouldnt that make people, like, not play the game? and turn them away from it?
Maybe… it depends on how bad the bugs are. If it’s not game-braking or utterly annoying, then most people will just put up with it.
Anyway, that’s the way patches are usually done. Most games don’t get daily updates shortly after release. It’s normal that there’s one or two patches almost initially after release, and then a few weeks pass until the next patch is released. Unless it’s a horribly broken game, then you might see more, quick patches.
Well for my region the price of the normal (not deluxe) version is 20€ from official seller and it’s a damn worth the price. Deluxe was 4,5€ more expensive so I got that.
Good game, no false advertising mod tools since day 1 – it’s worth to support them.
“the only problem is, if this works(patching everyday), more companies
will release even more broken games on release, and then patch it
everyday, which is not a bad thing”
Only AAA releasers could use this hypothetical way and even they would probably get too much negative advertising. As for smaller companies like Colossal Order/Paradox Games, releasing intentionally broken games would be suicidal. Cities:Skylines sold well because the reception was good. Imagine if it was released barely working. Nobody would buy it.
Yeah, they actually hit a snag already. The 1.0.7b patch apparently broke the game for many people. I can’t even get my game to update to 1.0.7b so I guess I am in the clear for now. I will play with 1.0.6b until steam patches it up and hope everything is all good going forward.
Still, there is a bit of trepidation now where there was none previously. And that is not good as I am a paying customer. :/
Not what they mean, they mean that less than .5% of copies distrobuted were illegitamate.
just because its cracked it doesnt mean a lot of people actually pirated it
Is anybody having the same fire problem in this game as I do ? I have firehouses all over the city and my buildings are still burning down
Yeah I have the problem as well. It’s not a huge problem but it does happen now and again even though I’ve got my city entirely protected with fire stations.
I dl’ed auto bulldoze on steamworkshop and it really helps coz at least 10 of my buildings burn down in a matter of minutes. Buildings next to firehouses burn down —__—
Industrial buildings in particular have a really high fire risk without the smoke detector city policy, no matter how many fire stations you have.
What you can do is use the districts tool to make districts for those high risk buildings, and turn smoke detectors on for them. Don’t turn it on city wide, as it costs a massive amount of money in residential areas where the risk is pretty low anyway. Low density residential in particular almost never catches fire if there’s a fire station anywhere close to being in range.
Traffic also matters for that, as if your fire trucks can’t get around easily, they don’t work as well.
Honestly the fire rate is too high (especially compared to how easy it is to keep the crime rate low), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tuned in a patch.
Totally right, offer a much better service at a good price and more people are willing to buy your game. I’m not into these types of games but I might just see if this game does, especially at the price.
You know what’s bad about releasing new patches every day? Game quality. Instead of fixing most of bugs they fixing only one bug per day. In other hand, if it’s minor bugs I think gamers won’t suffer.
Assuming it doesn’t take them a long time to consolidate all their currently ready bug fixes and push out a patch, that doesn’t really make sense. If they are only fixing bugs at a rate of 1 per day, releasing one each day is better than waiting a week so you can fix 7 at once. More frequent patches just means that we get the latest fixes sooner. It doesn’t mean they are going to fix fewer bugs or take longer to fix them. That’s just…. not how debugging works 😛
Also, as anyone who has ever worked on a remotely complicated software project can tell you: if you try to fix “most of the bugs” all at once in one giant patch, you’re almost guaranteed to INTRODUCE a ton of new bugs in the process. And it will be harder to figure out how to fix them, because you just changed so many different things at the same time and any one of them might be causing some weird bug.
“Here are a few small tidbits of info about Cities: Skylines – day 1 we had 0% piracy. pretty cool.”
Lie. There was a torrent up which was cracked on the same day it launched
“Here are a few small tidbits of info about Cities: Skylines – day 1 we had 0% piracy. pretty cool.”
Lie. There was a torrent up which was cracked on the same day it launched
You can even go to one of theses pirate sites and see the upload date was the 10th of March aka launch day
16% piracy. How the fk do they know that for sure? alot of people download the game to “test” the game before actually making a purchase. Just because i download a game now, doesnt mean 100% i wont buy it.
Meh Activision and their stupid corporate BS as usual. Since when an Activision game is even worth pirating let alone buy it? lololol!
1. This isn’t Activision
2. They’re not complaining about piracy rate, you’re an idiot.
3. They never claimed pirated copies = lost sales
i pirated it cause im not huge builder fan but after 3 hours i felt the developers worked hard on this and deserve my money so i bought it on steam 🙂
Cracked versions are the only way to to test out a game anymore. Most gaming developers don’t deserve blind support and gaming reviews are worthless due to corruption and “holier than thou” attitudes.
They should setup a free 30min to play thing on steam
Better yet, a free Steam weekend at, or shortly after, release on all new titles priced over $19.99 US.
With something like this, I would never download another cracked game.
That is actually a good idea.
I hope the game will be released on gog, if not I will prolly both buy and pirate it (I want to support but I prefer not to use Steam if possible)
I Pirated the game and Purchased it at next morning. If you make good games you don’t need to have DRM or other protection crap that costs millions and in the end only hurts paying customers.
Sad truth is that people get burned too many times with sh**ty games like Sim City 2013 terrible business choices and Cities XLL scam and need to Pirate games to get some trust the product is actually enjoyable.
Patches are pirated too, within hours or minutes.
You completely missed the point he was making.
I just pointed something out.
Thats the issue with games like ubisoft, the pirated version is almost always the superior one.
16%? How do they know? I guess they’re counting just the people that don’t use a firewall.
Oh, I guess they could count the “completed downloads” number on many torrent sites. I think? Even that’s not a good metric. How many people download it and never play it? Is that still pirating? The point is, you can’t trust piracy numbers to tell you anything useful.
that is true, i torrented DAI when it’s released but i had a legit copy of the game. only downloaded from torrent because of EA servers in my region.
so no updates?
i can update it, it’s slow but for 200mb 300mb it’s ok
I like what I see so far, with Cities: Skylines. I will be getting a torrent to try out the game to see if I like it. If I do, I’ll pay for it on my Steam account. If I don’t like it, I’ll delete it. My entertainment dollar is too precious to waste on bad products.
I miss the days of demos and gaming journalism that wasn’t overtly corrupt or preachy.
lul lies.. i saw pirated copy hour 1
I pirated this game too but it’s so good that I bought it. Pirating games is a good way to test them out whether you’ll like the game or not, but not really a good idea for multiplayer games sadly.
I don’t normally buy a lot of games anymore as my attention to them fades quickly. I bought this one the moment I read it was released and after reading the positive reviews on it.
I think theyve already accomplished this goal partially. Firstly let me admit I pirated the game.. 2 days later I purchased it. My reasons were piracy were simple. A, sim city was shit , I shouldn’t tarnish them with the same brush but I was skeptical, b, I don’t always get along with this style of game . I tend to pick them up and put them down . i didn’t sant to pay the money if it was an impulse buy cod everyone was talking about it.
I purchased because I was enjoying the game. I’m a software developer and ignoring the games appeal I was fascinated by how in depth some of the interactions between the ai their surroundings , travel work etc. i think they’ve produced something very clever. And from my professional standpoint I think they should have my money for the sheer amazement .
They are already fighting piracy with the workshop. The steam workshop files cannot be downloaded without owning the game . There’s a script which does it but it doesn’t seem to work for cities skylines mods . So people are after e auto bulldoze , fps mode, unlock all tiles mod and they have to go on the workshop to get it. There’s obviously other means but convenience and speed of workshop releases will be a sure factor in people buying the game.
I think they’ve done very well and I’m genuinely looking forward to see what the bring to the table in the future.
The game is freaking great 🙂 I love making adding train tracks everywhere XD
Even if the folks cracking the game choose to do so for each and every update, it usually takes a day or two for the newest crack to become available, and from there an end-user still needs to torrent the update, install it, and reapply cracks… not exactly a great user experience.
Compare to using Steam or any other game with auto-update/launcher functionality, where it just happens by itself. Even the few games that still require manual download/install of updates are a smoother experience.
The thing that’s more important than making piracy difficult without using shitty DRMs is making a product that people simply feel is worth spending money on… I’d bet a fair few of the people who do pirate C:Sky will do so as somewhat of a demo, decide that Paradox/CO earned deserve the cash for this, and decide to purchase the game… CO developed a solid game, and Paradox put it out at a good price, and without any major money-whoring behavior or anti-consumer components (like shitty DRM).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_4vvRqUgAAo_QK.jpg:large
Yeah I have been saying myself that piracy is fought with convenience. From video games to TV series. If TV series were able to be viewed at any time, on-demand internationally, people would instead pay for such a service because it’s more convenient than pirating.
Convenience matters to a lot of people and people will pay for that alone.
I agree actually with that but they would never allow it fully since its more convenient for them to shove 33% of what you watch with commercials.
Steam Workshop is a great deterrent!
Its no secret that after companies like EA/UBISOFT makes whatever smelly, rotten, diseaseridden piece of sh*t, that NEEDS updates to even run, the gamer community starts beeing skeptical toward them. With that said though, companies like Paradox make a prime example of how a company SHOULD act. This both in terms of PR towards actual downloaded pirated copies (like this), but also towards the actual quality of the game itself.
With all the bonus they are throwing out there, its just a matter of time before they REALLY get the same “brand” as i.e. Blizzard used to have, or whatever other companies (Maxis/Westwood/… OH WAIT THEY GOT BOUGHT BY EA!? WHICH IN TURNS SHAT ALL OVER THEM!)
Before reading this, I bought the game.
And this game was already cracked 10 minutes after official release, so tweet: day 1: 0% piracy is BS!
Another attempt to bring down piracy, but it failded ;(
They don’t deserve piracy, only EA (simcity hmm) does (and ubisoft too, but less).
It failed becuase these people who make these torrents update the torrents immediatly, it’s not automatic and a bit harder but it’s one 10 mb, You update it in 30 seconds (from start download). It’s horrible to see how well Piracy is organised. Updating is via torrents is even faster than steam, my Cities Skylines did not update immediatly. Mods also don’t work (and parks, buildings and intersections too) to bring down piracy. You can get awful lot mods and other assets via Piracy. It’s just scary. What CO did, is actually the same that piracy does. Giving a fast and free option for something with the some quality where you need to pay for.
It’s still easy to get a bunch of mods via piracy, and they dont need to use steam