Cities: Skylines, the new city simulator from developers Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive, sold 250,000 copies in its first 24 hours. While this number does include preorders, and is therefore not quite as impressive as it would otherwise be, as a point of comparison, Europa Universalis IV, Paradox Development Studio’s grand strategy game, sold 300,000 units in six months.

It remains to be seen how close Cities: Skylines can come to the SimCity reboot’s two-week figure of 1.1 million units. (Clearly, Maxis Emeryville didn’t go under for lack of a market.)

On Twitter, Paradox Interactive’s Vice President of Acquisitions had some words about the perception that PCs aren’t a good platform for developers “because piracy”:

Here are a few small tidbits of info about Cities: Skylines – day 1 we had 0% piracy. pretty cool. Day 2 16%. 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. It’s all about offering the superior service. That’s how we bring down piracy. By making the paid experience a superior one.

Jorjani also recognizes that the game’s Steam Workshop integration makes the pirated experience a significantly lesser one, as Steam’s Workshop allows users to create and upload their own content for the game for other players to enjoy.

Cities: Skylines is now available for Windows, Linux, and Mac PCs through Steam, on which it currently has “overwhelmingly positive” impressions.

We’ll be reviewing this title, so check back.