A Bird’s Eye View of Anytown
Okay so it’s not ‘good’ for city planning as much as it’s ‘wholly inappropriate,’ especially in a professional setting. A development firm used a Cities: Skylines screenshot in their brochure for a proposed new town outside of Norfolk in the UK. Not only that, but the screenshot in question was three years old. They didn’t even grab one from the latest expansions! A missed opportunity, really.
Jessica Frank-Keyes (of the Eastern Daily Press) was kind enough to point this out in a recent article. Apparently, a Cities: Skylines fan named Matt Carding-Woods was the original whistleblower. He noted that “for a professional developer to take one of these shots and use it as representative of a real development is just downright lazy.” Yes the game is incredibly detailed, but it’s not for professional use.
I mean, what would have happened if this development firm had found a different game image in their seconds of research? Can you imagine trying to sell a huge project like this with a screenshot from SimCity 2000 in your proposal? The lesson to be learned is thus: Always visit the site of the picture you’re about to steal. You never know where it might actually be from.