Manor Lords Publisher Responds Critically to Allegations of Slow Game Development. „Not Every Game Should Be Aimed at Becoming Some Live-Service Boom or Bust”
Tim Bender from Hooded Horse disagrees with the developer of The Long Dark, who criticized Manor Lords, citing Grzegorz Styczen's game as an example of the problem of slow early access development.
Statistics regarding the number of players, although helpful, shouldn't be treated as the sole and ultimate measure of success. This is what some developers, including the publisher of Manor Lords, are advocating in response to criticism of the game's "failure" as an example of early access problems.
It all started with a statement from Raphael van Lierop, the developer of The Long Dark. The CEO of Hinterland studio claimed in a post on LinkedIn that the game of Slavic Magic studio highlighted the issue of a situation where a title developed by a small team (and promoted as such) is released in Early Access and encounters the expectations of "hungry audiences."
The Long Dark dev about the "traps" of Early Access
In a nutshell: the developer believes that Manor Lords fails due to slow pace of development. The modest team working on the project doesn't provide regular updates, which would keep the game "fresh." This is supposed to be disadvantageous in that - we quote - the game lacks "dynamics," and after "5-10 rounds there is nothing more to do."
As evidence, van Lierop cites, among other things, the record number of players playing a given title simultaneously every day. In fact, the game's "peak" isn't even close to the over 173,000 users from the time of release. Currently, in ML, there aren't always around 10,000 players at the same time (via SteamDB).
Early Access is a marathon, and when you launch you need to have your next major content expansion pretty much in the queue. The game [Manor Lords] has been out for 2.5 months and there have been three fairly small patches with no new features or content.
Manor Lords publisher critically about the industry "Not Every Game Should Be Aimed at Becoming Some Live-Service Boom or Bust"
Under the original post, you can already find opinions that disagree with van Lierop's accusations. Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, also spoke out on the matter (via LinkedIn). Interestingly, the head of the publisher of Manor Lords had to explain to Grzegorz Styczen, the game's creator, even before the premiere, that people would complain about "missed opportunities" due to insufficient development pace - and he advised the Pole in advance to ignore these comments and focus on working on ML.
Bender points to the entry of The Long Dark creator as an example of a distorted perspective, which causes many problems for game developers, forcing endless development to maintain a growth trend. The CEO of Hooded Horse believes that the industry needs to move away from this approach, as not every production is a game service, whose survival depends on constant "acceleration" and growth.
Before the release, I had a chat with Manor Lords' dev. I told him that after release, he was going to hear from all sorts of commenters talking about missed opportunities because he failed to grow as fast as they wanted, and judging the game a failure by some kind of expectation they formed. I told him to ignore all that- -to focus on his core vision for the game, and to keep in mind that the Early Access road is long and that he should not feel any sense of pressure from the expectations of others — for both his own health and stress levels over the coming years and for preserving the state of calm and peaceful mind that supports his creative vision.
If this industry is to find a more sustainable path forward, we need to move away from takes like the below. Success should not create an ever-raising bar of new growth expectations. Not every game should be aimed at becoming some live-service boom or bust. And a release should not begin an ever-accelerating treadmill on which devs are forced to run until their mental or physical health breaks down.
3,000 words
Bender mentions that in principle, all other factors besides the "peak" on Steam oblige to recognize Manor Lords as a great success of the publisher, who is "overjoyed beyond measure" with this result. The game's sales surpassed 250,000 copies in just the last month, which is an outstanding achievement for a seemingly niche game, especially considering that 2 million copies were sold in the three weeks following its debut in EA on April 26.
The title still has very positive reviews on Steam (only 12% negative), and the median playtime is almost 9 hours (which, according to Bender, is a very good result overall, let alone for a fairly fresh project).
Bender adds that describing one of the three "small" updates for Manor Lords requires over 3,000 words and 10 pages in a text editor. Of course, none of these updates brought any significant new features (strolling with a lord or lady around the estates, while a pleasant addition, is hardly a revolution), but they did bring about a lot of changes.
It should also be noted that the fans themselves aren't complaining about the slow development of the game. On the contrary, they forced the dev to take a "leave" at the end of June. So - as Bender wrote - both the creator and the publisher, as well as the players, are satisfied. In such a case, how can Manor Lords be pointed to as an example of an early access failure?
Palworld devs applaud
Bender isn't the first person to criticize looking at activity records on Steam and the increase in the number of players as an indicator of a video game's success. Bucky from the Pocketpair studio expressed a similar sentiment much earlier, arguing that there is nothing wrong with completing games and moving on to the next ones. One of the developers of Palworld mentioned the entry of Manor Lord's publisher and explicitly agreed with the statement of the head of Hooded Horse (via X).
Some Internet users also cynically observe that The Long Dark has yet to receive the promised final episode, and van Lierop himself isn't rushing to release additional updates. Moreover, the last one was somewhat unfinished; suffice it to say that the developer temporarily withdrew it.
