The publishers of recent city-building sensation Manor Lords and survival-sim giant The Long Dark are locked in a mostly amicable spat over how many major updates a game in Early Access should receive and the potential consequences of doing so, such as developer overwork and loss of player interest.
Yesterday, Hinterland CEO Raphael van Lierop posted a LinkedIn message describing Manor Lords as “a pretty interesting case study in the pitfalls of Early Access development, when a game built by a small team (and heavily marketed as such) meets the reality of a hungry audience.” Much like RPS’s own bourgeois serf-slanderer Nic Reuben, Van Lierop is fond of Manor Lords, describing it as “very high quality,” but has a bone to pick with the lack of major additions since release.
“It started with a pretty strong base game, but without much content,” van Lierop writes. “A heavily systems-focused game needs a set of maps, game modes, or some amount of proc-gen dynamics to keep it fresh.
“Manor Lords has none of those things. So once you’ve played 5-10 turns of the game, there’s nothing left to do. The fixed cards and simplicity of resourcing mean that there aren’t many different permutations of the early game, as the starting conditions are almost always the same. This isn’t great for an RTS/city builder.”
Van Lierop claims that Manor Lords developers Slavic Magic can’t meet the need for expansion, as the studio is essentially a one-man operation: Grzegorz Styczeń (he had some help with the sheepgut-based soundtrack). Still, he feels that Hooded Horse should have worked with Styczeń to make some juicy changes right before launch.
“Due to the lack of updates, the CCUs [concurrent users worldwide] “These are huge drops since launch (which isn’t all that unusual – it’s a current trend for a lot of Early Access titles exploding these days),” he writes. “But given the sheer number of wishlists and hype surrounding it in the lead-up to launch, this is something the developer and publisher should have been better prepared for, IMO.”
“Early Access is a marathon, and when you launch you pretty much have to have your next big content expansion queued up,” the post continues. “The game has been out for 2.5 months and there have been three fairly minor patches with no new features or content.
“That’s why I’ve put the game aside and don’t expect to look at it for at least 6 months. At that point I’ll probably be focused on playing something else. It’s really hard to get people’s attention back once you’ve lost it.”
Van Lierop concludes by advising that developers of early access games should plan on “2-3 major updates with new content and features (in addition to the hotfixes you have to roll out)” within three months of release.
That’s not how Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, sees the situation. He describes van Lierop’s message as “exactly the kind of warped endless growth/burden of expectations/line must go up perspective that causes so much trouble in the games industry.” He’s also unconcerned about Manor Lords falling short of its initial massive popularity, mocking “the seemingly dark reality that some people, after enjoying their purchase of a premium, single-player title, might decide to move on and play another game (The horror! The horror!).”
Bender says he warned Styczeń not to pay attention to comments about players straying from Manor Lords. “Before release, I had a conversation with the dev of Manor Lords. I told him that after release, he would hear all kinds of commentators talking about missed opportunities because it wasn’t growing as fast as they wanted, and that they were judging the game as a failure based on an expectation they had formed.
“I told him to ignore all that, to focus on his core vision for the game, and to remember that the road to Early Access is a long one and that he shouldn’t feel any pressure from other people’s expectations, both for his own health and stress levels in the years to come and to maintain the state of calm and peaceful mind that supports his creative vision.
“If this industry is to find a more sustainable path forward, we must move away from these practices. [van Lierop’s post],” Bender concludes. “Success shouldn’t create an ever-increasing bar of new growth expectations. Not every game should be geared toward becoming a live-service boom or bust. And a release shouldn’t start an ever-increasing treadmill that developers are forced to run on until their mental or physical health gives out.”
What’s missing from the discussion is a sense of how much money Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse currently need to support the continued development of Manor Lords. I think Bender is right, but in van Lierop’s defense, he’s calling for a specific pace of new expansions to keep players coming back, not crunching “endless” growth. Hinterland itself isn’t a fan of overworking in the name of thickening the roadmap – the opening screen of The Long Dark contains the words “made without crunch by people who care about their players at a studio that cares about its people.”
We spoke to Bender himself earlier this year about how Manor Lords will change during early access. He described Stycze&’s approach as “collaborative” and “community-engaged.” If you love the game and are having trouble finding things to do within it, maybe take a leaf out of the Reubensday Tome’s book and stalk the cattle.