Long Dark dev criticises Manor Lords for lack of updates, Hooded Horse CEO replies that not every game needs to be "some live-service boom or bust"

rockpapershotgun.com:

The publishers of recent city builder sensation Manor Lords and elder survival sim juggernaut The Long Dark are having a mostly gentlepersonly skirmish about how many significant updates a game should have in early access, and the potential consequences in terms of both developer overwork and players losing interest.

Yesterday, Hinterlands CEO Raphael van Lierop published a LinkedIn post describing Manor Lords as “a pretty interesting case-study in the pitfalls of Early Access development when a game with a small team (and heavily marketed as such) hits the reality of a hungry audience”. Much like RPS’s in-house bourgeois serf-botherer Nic Reuben, Van Lierop is keen on Manor Lords, describing it as “of very high quality”, but has a bone to pick with the shortage of major additions since release.

“It launched with a pretty strong base game but without much content,” van Lierop writes. “A heavily systems-centric game needs either a range of maps, game modes, or some amount of proc-gen dynamism to keep it fresh.

“Manor Lords has none of those things. So once you played 5-10 rounds of the game, there's nothing more to do. The fixed maps and resourcing simplicity mean there are not many different permutations of the early game because the starting conditions are almost always the same. This is not great for an RTS/city-builder.”

Van Lierop claims that Manor Lords developers Slavic Magic are unable to meet the need for expansion because the studio is essentially one person, Grzegorz Styczeń (he’s had some help with the sheepgut-based soundtrack), but feels nonetheless that Hooded Horse should have worked with Styczeń to roll out some juicy changes closer to launch.

“As a result of the lack of updates, the CCUs [concurrent users worldwide] have plummeted since launch (which isn't that unusual - it's the current trend for a lot of Early Access titles that blow up these days),” he writes. “But given the huge number of wishlists and hype around it leading up to launch, this