Cities: Skylines is being pirated, but Paradox Interactive isn't panicking. Instead, the publisher will continue to support the game, thus making the Steam version more attractive than any unpatchable and unmoddable pirated version could ever be.

Taking to Twitter, Paradox's Sham Jorjani made a case for post-launch support being the best discouragement for pirates. Noting a steep 16 per cent increase in pirated copies of the game, Jorjani Tweeted that "our plan for pirates is to make a great game even better through free updates - making it more convenient to use Steam instead."

"It's all about offering the superior service," he added. "That's how we bring down piracy. By making the paid experience a superior one."

Jorjani went on to name Netflix as an example of convenience trumping piracy in the digital age. Meanwhile, Paradox's quick rollout of Magicka updates 14 in 13 days meant that users preferred to actually pay for the game and get auto-updates, rather than manually download the game each time the studio patched it. 

To put it simply: ongoing content rollouts and mod support is a better way to combat piracy than DRM.

"Or....we could build our own ecosystem," Jorjani joked. "Call it....P-play....or...Plorigins...or P-vapor or somesuch...yeah let's do that."

Cities: Skylines has already attracted a massive audience: modders have already added a first-person mode, while one dedicated player has recreated Los Santos.

Not even a week has gone by and the Steam Workshop for Cities: Skylines is already bursting at the seams with player-made content. Along with maps and buildings created using the game's editors, mods have begun to appear, most notably one that lets you unlock all 25 map tiles. The vanilla game lets you use nine, which is still pretty roomy, but why limit yourself?

The tile unlocking mod is hard to make a full column out of, however, so here's one you might also want to check out: the free camera mod.

It's described as a first-person camera mod, but it's really more of a noclip mode, allowing you to fly through the city unrestrained, drop down to street level, zip between buildings (or through them), and basically check out your creation from any spot you like.

Got a problem in your city? Don't be an aloof mayor, coldly sitting in your office in the sky. Go check it out in person. It's the least you can do when your citizens start complaining about traffic or taxes or garbage collection or, I dunno, that their houses are submerged in sixty feet of water. You know, the kinda stuff people just have to gripe about.

Once you subscribe to the mod, you'll need to activate it in Content Manager menu. In the game, you'll now see a button in the top right corner of your screen. Click it to bring up a settings window, which lets you set the speed you want to move at and how close to the ground you want to get. Move around with WASD. Tab returns you to normal mode, or you can configure it to another key.

Obviously, your city wasn't meant to be seen from quite so close up, so it's not exactly pretty, but it's still a neat tool and useful for getting a closer look at things. For instance, what's going on at that bus stop? Clearly, there's just too much novelty food truck traffic to let the bus through. Get on it, mayor!

I think the game's regular camera is fine for the most part, but it can occasionally be tricky seeing things up close since it bounces over buildings, trees, and hills, so the new camera is a nice addition. I even loaded up a save from the diary I did this week, to get a close look at one of the more disturbing events that took place.

You can find the mod here in the Steam Workshop.

PC gamers can't actually play Grand Theft Auto V yet, but thanks to the efforts of Steam user grockefeller, we can pay a visit to the friendly city of Los Santos, which he has recreated—along with Palomino and Sandy Shores—in Cities: Skylines.

Man, that was fast.

Cities: Skylines was not a game I expected to be a hit, but it came off quite well in our review, and even more importantly, people are buying it and doing some amazing things with it. This mod lets players take to the streets to appreciate the fruits of their urban planning labors from a first-person perspective, for instance, while this weirdo created an entire city in which only one, single home could be built, and then spent days spying on the family that moved in.

The Los Santos reconstruction is a project on a somewhat larger scale. The mod description says it's "the completely built region of South San Andreas including the cities of Los Santos, Palomino, and Sandy Shores." Note that in order to actually use it, you'll also need the separate 2x4 parking lots mod, and unlimited money to cover the city's debt, which is apparently significant. As grockefeller succinctly put it, "It was expensive."

I like to imagine that city building games are already first-person; just that the person in question is an invisible floating omnipotent sky-mayor. A mod for Cities: Skylines offers the more traditional first-person view—albeit one from what appears to be an improbably tall citizen.

The mod allows you to explore the streets of your city. It's a simple camera switch, but one that offers an interesting perspective on your city's simulated citizens. It would have certainly let Chris L get down-close-and-personal to the occupants of his single-house city.

Below you can see the mod in action. If you want to try it out, head over to the Steam Workshop.

City-building sim Cities: Skylines has become Paradox' most successful game launch, selling 250,000 copies in its first 24 hours. The number—tallied from day one sales and pre-orders—has made CEO Fredrik Wester quite happy.

We would like to offer our deepest and heartfelt thanks to the community for their passionate support and to let them know that we are committed to supporting this wonderful game for years to come, in much the same way that we have for our Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis communities," he sends in a statement.

"We knew that we had a great game on our hands and so to be able to continue to provide fans of the game with a multitude of new content for it going forward is fantastic.

The inclusion of mod support should certainly help Skylines' longevity. There are already more than 3,400 mods hosted on the Steam workshop page, including one that lets you wander around your city in first-person, and another that adds a convenient autosave function.

That's lovely to see, because Cities: Skylines is really good. Find out why in our review, and enjoy the strange cocktail of humour and sadness hidden away in Chris L's diary about his city with only one house.