Manor Lords turned out to be a great success, and one of the reasons that increases the amazement at the results achieved is the fact that the game was in fact created by a single author, Greg Styczeńwho doesn’t even seem inclined to set up a larger team to be able to publish updates faster.
In an interview published by PC Gamer, Tim Bender, the CEO of the publisher Hooded Horse, made it clear that behind the solo development of Manor Lords there is a sort of philosophy of work by the author Styczeń, and that this will not change with the success of the game and the pressing demands of the public.
Bender pointed out how, already 4 days after the launch in Early Access, someone was judging the “abandoned” project because it had not yet received a major update, but this is a vision that absolutely does not suit Styczeń’s way of working.
Work calmly
According to some commentaries, such as one cited in particular by Bender, the author of Manor Lords should “immediately hire 50 people to create a bigger company and thus develop updates faster”, but this is something that was categorically rejected by Styczeń.
“The best growth is slow,” Bender reported, speaking of the vision of the work shared with the author of Manor Lords. “It’s about keep the original vision intactand that’s the importance of also maintaining the work process that Greg established.”
On the other hand, Styczeń himself has previously reported that he has no intention of publishing any detailed update plans for Manor Lords: “I’ve made that mistake a few times, promising to work on a feature only to realize that the testers didn’t they cared too much about that and wanted something different instead,” Styczeń wrote.
Because of this, the plan right now is to “listen, test, and deploy,” but the first month of patches will likely only be about cleanup and bug fixes, while also gathering user feedback during the Early Access phase.
It also emerged that the publisher and developer did not expect such success for Manor Lords, which immediately reached the top of the Steam rankings.
