Deep dive: inside Manor Lords' 2 million-selling success

Also: how companies like Square Enix need to pivot, and lots of discovery news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

It’s a public holiday in some parts of the globe today. But GameDiscoverCo decided to queue up one of our more-awaited posts for detonation (when you return to your email inbox!) in the form of our ‘real data’ analysis of Manor Lords.

But before we get going, Aaron "Noxy" Donaghey, CEO of Hypixel Studios, presented a real tearjerker of an inspirational DICE 2024 talk on late Minecraft YouTuber Technoblade. And we spotted that the talk is now up on YouTube - we recommend.

[HEY YOU: you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to our Steam data back-end for unreleased & released games & our weekly PC/console sales trends newsletter, Discord access, eight detailed game discovery eBooks - & lots more.]

Inside Manor Lords’ 2 million unit success - how?

Some of you may have been surprised to learn that PC medieval city builder & strategy sim (with combat elements!) Manor Lords sold a whopping 2 million units - the vast majority on Steam - from its April 26th Early Access debut to May 17th.

On the other hand, as we noted in last Monday’s newsletter, if you were following the numbers, you would have seen (a version of!) this coming: “GameDiscoverCo estimates that Manor Lords… was perhaps the ‘most wishlisted’ Steam game to debut since the start of 2023, with the exception of Bethesda’s Starfield.”

So… what on Earth? How did a (largely) solo dev title that lacks any IP or ‘name developer’ background rack up so much interest and then convert? Well, there’s been intense interest in Manor Lords for a long time - back in 2021, we covered PlayWay’s Viking City Builder, a slightly re-themed ‘fast follow’ of the game. (Yet to debut, btw.)

‘Just the facts, Sir’ - behind the scenes Steam numbers…

We’d like to start with some real-world Steam data provided to us by its publisher Hooded Horse, such as the game’s wishlists (above). And yes, Manor Lords launched with 3.2 million wishlists (?!) Late 2022’s mega-bump is related to the game’s Next Fest demo, of course.

So the game had super-good organic wishlist additions throughout. (And we’ll get into why shortly!) Post-release, it’s now had 4.7 million wishlist adds, 330k wishlist deletes, and 1.2 million purchases from its wishlist, leaving it with a 3.15 million WL balance. (That’s a deep bench to pull from for upcoming discount sales and the 1.0 version.)

Manor Lords’ sales per country are also interesting, if unsurprising for a strategy game. A standout, Germany has a whopping 14% of the game’s sales (that’s 0.3% of all Germans!), with the U.S. (21%) and China (14%) leading the unit sales race.

What are the hook(s) that made Manor Lords so big?

So what the heck is the unique selling point of this game? We need to talk about hook. And so we asked Manor Lords’ publisher - Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender - for insight. He thinks:

“At its heart, Manor Lords offers a lovingly crafted, immersive experience. It's a game where you can follow an ox around or observe the lives of the peasants inhabiting the city. Ultimately I think those experiences connect with players (regardless of the specific genre or theme) and that's a huge part of what makes Manor Lords appealing.”

This is also a strong theme in comments on YouTube videos about Manor Lords: “Finally, a colony sim game where you can play as an avatar instead of hovering above the town like an ethereal god.” This isn’t completely accurate - the zoomed-in modes are more ‘spectator mode’, as Tim notes.

But in providing a) GTA-looking ‘day in the life’ observation modes alongside b) robust and great-looking traditional citybuilding with a ‘sandbox’ element and other strategic mechanics - even c) building up troops using resources and engaging in combat - the world feels like a grander canvas than a ‘limited’ topdown citybuilder.

If this game is ‘unfinished’, why does everyone love it?

It’s also notable how much slack players are cutting the game in Early Access - in the above IGN video review, which gave the game 7 out of 10, there’s a lot of supportive player comments about ‘unfinished’ being fine: “This game, made by 1 single person btw, is more fun, more complete, and has a more clear vision than most triple A garbage.”

In other words, people believe in the vision presented, and they’re OK with some elements being uncooked, or in progress. The game’s developer - Greg Styczeń - put out an extremely clear ‘expectation setting’ Steam news post ahead of time.

You’ll note that it starts with ‘what this game is not’, and goes on to underscore its Early Access nature, with Styczeń saying: “I want to pursue an open development strategy of a back and forth between me and you.” If there’s two million of ‘you’, it may get loud for the dev. But this is what people want to see in terms of transparency nowadays.

An important note - the game wasn’t just dumped into EA. Hooded Horse’s Bender notes: “The game was originally scheduled for an October 2023 release, but together with the developer we decided to move it back to April 2024 to allow for additional work.”, even though “the game was already a fun experience even back during its October 2022 demo.”

And you can see results in the (impressive, given age of game) 8 hour 30 minute median playtime. Bender adds: “I do think expectations have been rising over time in terms of what an Early Access release should offer, and ensuring we met those expectations is a part of what motivated the initial delay. I do think being open and honest with players is essential - Manor Lords has a lot of parts of the game expressly locked off until later in Early Access.”

We’d love to keep poking at Manor Lords for days, but this newsletter has a word limit. So here’s three more notable things, to end things out:

• Why would Manor Lords’ dev sign with a publisher later?: Styczeń took a publisher deal, even though his game was already trending on Steam. He explains why in this interview: “Do you want to sit down and send 1,000 emails to all the press before launch, optimize tags on stores, and sit on calls with partners? For me, I learned to greatly appreciate that I can focus on actual development tasks instead.”

• The game didn’t share pricing until launch - in part - to deal with Steam key resellers: with a huge game like Manor Lords, all kinds of shenanigans occur with gray market key resellers trying to sell ‘pre-orders’ of the game. As Bender explained on Reddit: “We don’t want players to get scammed or cheated by such sites, and giving them a definite price to plan around would probably just increase their proliferation and marketing of these ‘pre-orders’.” This tactic helped keep them at bay.

• It was building the game on top of the tech that’s the hard part: in the EpicGames.com interview, Styczeń adds that perhaps he “underestimated how much work is needed on a game but where you don't expect it. Like extracting actual playtime and making it fun, versus doing the technical bits. Because you can probably make an RTS "project" in a week, throw in a camera and some units, but to make it fun to play for five, 20, 100 hours, that's a real challenge.”

And that’s a perfect takeaway to end this analysis of Manor Lords. Because anyone (with a good enough in-house CG department!) can put up a trailer for a game like Viking City Builder, and have it add lots of wishlists, if it has the right hook.

But actually delivering a deep game based on that trailer - while managing expectations intelligently - is the tricky bit. And sure, Manor Lords ‘feels’ a tad unfinished - hence that 7/10 IGN review, which showcases some in-game glitches.

But - as the IGN video commenters correctly pushed back on - it feels the right kind of unfinished, the immersive, intriguing, ‘I want to see more’ Early Access version. In that universe, cosmetic bugs are fine, as long as you’ve nailed the substance. Which Manor Lords 100% has…

Square Enix, Fortnite & AAA game price shifts…

Some of you may be aware of a long Twitter/X thread by current Genvid CEO Jacob Navok commenting on Square Enix’s recent, underperforming results. Navok has history with SQEX, having worked at corporate (Square Enix Holdings) and at the company’s shuttered cloud gaming division Shinra Technologies.

While the start of the thread is more of a ‘Square Enix tries to set its expectations responsibly, honest!’ ROI discussion, it’s later on where things get more interesting. Here’s some of the bigger of Jacob’s takeaways on big standalone AAA games:

• The previous AAA ‘pick your release date & grab the audience’ strategy was more predictable: “Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite. The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after.”

• The rise of attractive, constantly updated GaaS games has changed things: “If you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews…” In other words, switching costs are much higher - especially if you can hang with your friends in the GaaS title.

• There’s only three levers to ROI improvement in non-GaaS AAA: those are decreasing costs, increasing price, or increasing audience size. Navok suggests it’s difficult to reliably scale audience - or cut costs for ‘best in class’ AAA - so “this leaves only price left as a lever to pull.” He cites Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws - $70, but has $110 and $130 deluxe/season pass editions as the direction of travel here.

There’s also a follow-up post where Navok makes a point that we’ve often considered about business model diversification for companies like Square Enix: “The real puzzle to me, which I hinted at in the previous thread, is why someone other than SQEX made [free to play, gacha-monetized title] Genshin Impact; that should have been their market to capture. Expect creating a similar title to be a major focus the next few years.”

Of course, the main reason could be because Square Enix had a lot of expensive AAA titles that might be disrupted by a F2P competitor from within its own ranks. (And it might not have the stomach to monetize as aggressively as Genshin on the high-end.) But that’s led to companies like MiHoYo mainstream-ing SQEX’s gameplay playbook.

At the end of this follow-up, Navok comes to the following conclusion about ‘the resulting industry’ after Square Enix wrote off $140 million on small & mid-sized titles:

• Publicly traded AAA game publishers will focus on fewer titles, with a combination of live service (microtransaction; e.g. an [Final Fantasy] version of Genshin) and a higher price point fixed-price (Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy) in the $70-$150 range

• The mid-tier is the domain of independent developers and smaller publishers at the $30-$60 price point.

• Live service titles will increasingly platform-tize and offer UGC [user-generated content] tools (expect this to be a big part of GTA.)

It’s intriguing to see this definition of the ‘mid-tier’ as still including $60 games, given GameDiscoverCo more often covers ‘indie breakouts’. (We think games like Lords Of The Fallen or even Baldur’s Gate III fall into Navok’s ‘mid-tier’ category.) But hey, everything is ‘mid-tier’ compared to Grand Theft Auto VI, right?

The game platform & discovery news round-up..

Let’s finish things off for now with a few game platform and discovery links, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got for you this time:

• Alongside Sony’s corporate strategy meeting presentation (.PDF), sporting killer catchphrases such as ‘Creative Entertainment Vision’, PlayStation’s parent also put out this ‘video prototyping exercise’ (above), asterisked heavily: “The content in this video is not directly related to any existing Sony products or services.” It’s much more ‘2050 concept car’ than ‘production vehicle’, but go on, ‘ave a giggle.

• The UK just “passed a bill that's the country's version of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA)”, and notably: “For the first time, the [UK Competition & Markets Authority] will have the power to impose a hefty fine if it determines a company has violated a consumer law.” Peely and his friends at Epic are hyped about this, saying “Epic Games Store and Fortnite are coming to iOS in the UK in the second half of 2025.”

• Steam’s ‘top new games/DLC of April 2024’ sale is up and running, and there’s no surprises in there: debuts like Infection Free Zone and Manor Lords, 1.0 releases of Planet Crafter and Sker Ritual, and top DLC from base games including Call Of Duty: MW III, Total War: Warhammer III, and RimWorld (not III!).

• Netflix things: the new Cozy Grove mobile-first game, helmed by Netflix-owned internal dev Spry Fox, debuts on June 25th for those with Netflix accounts; those who like numbers can download Netflix’s entire TV/movie ‘hours streamed’ data for H2 2023. (Not games, but yum, transparency.)

• StreamElements’ state of game streaming for April 2024 documents a slow one: “With no major launches, few must-view events, and one less day than March, Twitch’s hours watched dropped 8%. Year-over-year, the decrease was less than 2%, which illustrates that Twitch is remaining steady but still looking for its next big growth driver.”

• Embracer’s latest results featured one interesting sales tidbit: “Dead Island 2 was successfully released on Xbox Game Pass in the quarter and has now sold above 3 million units and reached over 7 million players since launch just over a year ago.” (So that’s about 4 million Game Pass downloads for the shadowdropped GP version?)

• Following up on ‘lots of people play on last-gen consoles still’, Game File talked to players about why they keep using PS4s ($ post), citing lack of compelling next-gen exclusives: “This far into the PS5/Xbox Series era, you can stick with a PS4 or Xbox One and keep up with most of modern gaming. A lot of people told me this.”

• Funny we should mention that last-gen audience, since Kotaku is reporting that “A leak out of GameStop suggests that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will still come to PS4 and Xbox One, but continue to cost the same as the $70 “next-gen” versions.” (At least, that’s what it says in the store’s pre-order systems right now.)

• Ars Technica asks the big questions about the Gabe-terlife, citing a Steam support response about post-death Steam account ownership (!): "Steam Support can't provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will."

• As someone who was in the room during the GDC 2012 Indie Game: The Movie screening, I felt ‘all kinds of something’ at this retrospective on the documentary, which suggests that “the fates of the movie’s main characters since tell a thorny, sad story that doesn’t fit the filmmakers’ aspirational narrative.”

Finally, the excellent People Make Games YouTube channel is back with a look at… the world of Farming Simulator eSports? Count us in for some hectic hay bale action:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide data & consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]