Publisher Hooded Horse has announced that Manor Lords has sold over 2.5 million copies, which makes PC Gamer's best city builder of 2024 an undeniable smash hit. Speaking in a recent interview with the BBC, Hooded Horse co-founder Snow Rui says that, even though the publisher realised there was interest in the game's pre-release trailers and marketing, the sheer scale of the game's popularity was a surprise: "It would almost be arrogant not to be taken aback by how successful it turned out to be."
Rui reckons that Manor Lords' success is down to the twists it brings to the genre, and in particular that it allows players to wander around their own creations. When it became clear the game was selling extremely well, says Rui, the best piece of advice the publisher got was "don't roll too fast" and expand in the expectation that the good times will last forever.
"A breakout hit like this, you cannot count on it to repeat itself year after year," says Rui. "There will be people pushing you to have a different expectation or treating the next year as a failure if the breakout hit doesn't repeat itself but that's simply not the case. So that's a matter of setting your expectations and centering who you are."
The reality for most mid-tier publishers is that Manor Lords is a bit of a white whale but, if you do manage one, it can underwrite the rest of the business for years. Hooded Horse is doing rather better than that, though. The publisher has a wide and handsome range of games with a strategic bent, and knows its market very well: Against the Storm has sold over a million copies, while Workers & Resources sold 600k (as of last October). It's a powerful example of how a focused publisher that understands a particular genre can carve-out a significant niche in that market.
Getting back to Manor Lords, the game's latest update is in beta (you can access it from your Steam library by selecting the beta in "properties" and using password "veryNiceBasket") and essentially streamlines some of the economic busywork. Players can now overstock and upgrade buildings like the tavern, while fuel and fabric stores have been removed and replaced with an all-in-one general goods stall, and workers will now automatically recover leftover stock from abandoned stalls and use it in new ones.
The update also adds two new maps, High Peaks and Winding River, which add the terrain features you'd expect from the names. These come alongside the ability to build bridges and connect settlements across water, and a variety of buffs and nerfs to certain resources. The full patch notes are here and, as well as wishing players a happy new year, developer Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń says new members are joining the Manor Lords team in 2025. It certainly doesn't feel like Manor Lords has been rolling too fast: But it may be about to pick up the pace.
