(It’s amazing what a developer can achieve) – Manor Lords is a Steam sensation by any metric

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Michael
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Sales figures, player numbers and reviews speak for themselves

Manor Lords is now available in Early Access after many years of waiting and uncertainty. And it is immediately clear at the launch weekend: this building game may not yet be finished, but it is already a huge success

Let’s take a closer look at the most important figures and metrics for the medieval hopeful!

The sales figures

Manor Lords has already sold one million copies on Steam in just over 24 hours. This is reported by the producer Hooded Horse via Reddit For an indie title without a big publisher wallet and with only minimal marketing measures, this figure is absolutely exceptional

For comparison: The massive blockbuster game Spider-Man 2 sold 2.5 million copies in the same period, setting a new record for Sony’s PlayStation Studios in October 2023.

The player numbers

At the same time, player numbers also soared, as a look at SteamDB reveals. This does not even include the statistics from Game Pass and GOG, where Manor Lords is also available!

At its peak on April 27th,170,000 Steam users were online at the same time in Manor Lords, which catapulted the game to 7th place among the most-played Steam games. The title even overtook long-running hits such as Helldivers 2, GTA Online and Fallout 4, which was reignited in the wake of the Amazon series.

According to Hooded Horse, this is a record and “the highest figure for a city-building simulation” of all time. Even genre greats such as Civilization and Cities Skylines have never been able to achieve such player numbers on Steam.

The Steam reviews

Manor Lords is pretty, atmospheric, fascinating and yet still very unfinished in every nook and cranny – that was our thoroughly hopeful conclusion in the extensive Early Access test

The fact that there is still a lack of strategic depth, the techtree is unfinished and the lategame leaves a lot to be desired does not dampen the enthusiasm of the players: Manor Lords stands at an extremely comfortable 89 percent positive votes

on the launch weekend 

Here are a few examples from the community area:

It’s amazing what the game offers that a developer can achieve. Companies with more than 100 developers among them don’t have anywhere near as much to offer as this game. 30€ is almost too little for a revolutionary real-time strategy game.

Steam user Lord Skeggson IV

 

We’ve arrived in the year of “small indie developer makes masterpiece that beats big triple-A productions”

Steam user Charlie le Dickens

If this game gets a real opponent AI (is in development), which can build villages or even multiplayer should come – this is really the perfect medieval strategy building game!

Steam-User Mars

Despite the many construction sites, the tenor is very positive and many players praise the performance of such a small team, which for long stretches of development consisted of just one person: Polish developer Grzegorz “Greg” Styczen.

With all this success, he now has a lot of work ahead of him, because a lot still needs to happen for Manor Lords to reach its full medieval potential. Player feedback will be crucial, says Styczen: “My principle for the future is: listen, check, implement. “