Steam's most-anticipated city-builder gets even more anticipated as Manor Lords adds another 500,000 wishlists in just six days
Apr. 23, 2024Manor Lords is primed for a huge release
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Manor Lords, the medieval city-builder that made its way to the top of Steam’s wishlist charts earlier this month, is now firmly in ‘instant success story’ territory, having racked up 3 million wishlists after luring in another 500,000 potential players in just six days.
Last week, Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse announced that it had reached2.5 million wishlists, adding an extra 500,000 tothe milestone it had hit in January. Since the start of the year, thecity-builder has overtaken Hades 2 to become the most-wishlisted game on Steam. As of last night, however, it had added an additional 500k to that tally, taking its total wishlists to an astounding 3 million.
500,000 wishlists in a week is a huge haul, even before you take into account that Manor Lords is being made by just one developer. Greg Styczen is hard at work getting the game ready for its early access release on April 26,hard-nerfing sheep to fix the city builder’s burgeoning economyand reminding prospective players thatManor Lords isn’t an RPG, an RTS, or a competitor or Total War.
Conventional wisdom suggests that around 10-20% of wishlisters convert to early paid players, which suggests that Styczen is primed to shift an awful lot of copies during launch week. That flies in the face of early expectations for the game - Styczen’s girlfriend famously assumed that Manor Lords would be lucky to earn even a fraction of this attention, but it seems like it’s about to turn into one of Steam’s biggest indie hits of the year.
I played the medieval city builder-meets-RTS game that has 2 million wishlists on Steam and it blew my tiny mind.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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