Manor Lords Publisher Rejects Growth-At-All-Cost Idea: In response to a colleague, Hooded Horse boss Tim Bender explained that for the sustainability of the industry, this concept and all that it entails (see the crunch) must be overcome.
“Manor Lords Just Sold 250,000 Copies in the last month, after shipping over 2 million copies in its first three weeks, and has an 88% positive review score with an average playtime of 8 hours and 48 minutes per user (a lot for any game, especially one released recently),” Bender wrote.
“The players are happy, the developer is happy, and we as a publisher are thrilled beyond belief. And yet here we are: Manor Lords would be a ‘case study on the pitfalls of early access‘ because the ‘game has been out for two and a half months and there have only been three fairly small patches,'” according to a criticism leveled on LinkedIn by another publisher, Hinterland.
“This led to ‘a collapse in player numbers since launch‘ (yes, we didn’t maintain our peak of 173,000 concurrent users) and the fact that some people, after enjoying a premium single-player title, might decide to move on and play something else. Horror!” joked the Hooded Horse CEO.
The road to sustainability
“Before Manor Lords came out I had a chat with the developer. I told him that after the launch he would hear all kinds of commentators talking about missed opportunities because failed to grow as fast as they wantedand call the game a failure because of the anticipation they created.”
“I told him to ignore all this.to focus on his vision for the project and to keep in mind that the road to Early Access is long and that he should not feel any sense of pressure based on other people’s expectations, both for his health and for his stress levels in the coming years. He must preserve the state of calm and peace of mind necessary to maintain his creativity.”
“If this industry wants to find a more sustainable path, we need to move away from positions like those just reported. Success should not create an ever-higher bar of new expectations of growth,” Bender continued in his lengthy LinkedIn post.
“Not every game should aim to be a wildly successful live service or, conversely, a failure. And a launch shouldn’t start a continuously accelerating treadmill that developers are forced to run on until their mental or physical health does not collapse.”
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