The Manor Lords dev has the "ideal" approach to early access, says Hooded Horse: "It's not like, vote on the next feature"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Medieval city builder Manor Lords was Steam's most-wishlisted game prior to release, and has now managed the feat of transmuting that anticipation into broad enthusiasm and very healthy sales. Not too shabby, considering that it's mostly the work of just one person, Grzegorz Styczeń of Slavic Magic, who has hopefully found time to sleep now and then between fielding bug reports and preparing the game's first patches.

Styczeń understandably doesn't have much time for interviews right now - those troublesome archers aren't going to balance themselves - but yesterday I spoke to Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, about how Styczeń is getting on. The answer, apparently, is: pretty good, because Styczeń has a healthy approach to early access development in keeping players close, without quite handing them the wheel.

"My personal opinion is best kept well away from the game," Bender began. "The CEO of the publisher should not be getting involved on how a game works. But, you know, I can tell you that Greg has a great approach to development - even before early access, [though] it's an approach that is ideal for development in EA. It's a very collaborative approach. It's a very community-engaged approach. He would take polls on things, ask their opinions on various things, get that information, and then take that sort of under consideration. It's not like 'vote on the next feature', it's more like, 'vote to provide information' so that he can figure out [the next steps].

"It's that sort of best use of community engagement, in guiding someone's thinking and feed that thinking, so they can search for the way within a coherent vision [of how] to design the game," Bender went on. "And that's been Greg's approach before early access. He had the alpha tester group, over 100 people helping him work and refine the game. He also would regularly engage with the broader community, ask them questions as well. So it's not a strange new thing for him. It's just