There are many topics of debate in the gaming industry, and one of the biggest is the issue of piracy and how best to combat it. Some studios will use methods such as CD keys to combat it, while other games get programmed with hidden bonuses that trigger if a game is pirated and makes the game difficult or impossible to play. Paradox though plan to cut down on piracy for their new city-builder game Cities: Skylines simply by regularly updating it over Steam for free so often that it will always be more up to date than any cracked version.

This stance on tackling piracy was outlined by Paradox’s VP of Acquisition, Shams Jorjani, who spent a few hours last week clarifying it. He pointed out that services such as Netflix were so popular even in an age where if you look hard enough online you can find most programs available for free, simply because it offered a fair service that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Paradox previously used this update strategy with Arrowhead Games’ Magicka.

Since this, Jorjani has had tweets from people who may or may not have pirated the game who appreciated not being branded as hated criminals and enjoyed the game so much that they soon all went to actually buy it so they could get access to the regular free updates that were being offered by Paradox. Also of interest is the amount of people who said that they originally pirated the game purely because they had been burned before by the launches of games like SimCity, not wanting to waste money on what could potentially be another letdown.