Manor Lords pricing addressed by Hooded Horse CEO

Slavic Magic / Hooded Horse

Tim Bender, the CEO of publisher Hooded Horse, has addressed the questions around the price of upcoming city-builder Manor Lords and criticized the policies of triple-A publishers. Being the most-wishlisted game on Steam with over three million followers, Manor Lords will be launching into Early Access on April 26, 2024. However, there is no pre-order for the game and no pricing has been announced so far – an almost strange scenario in today’s industry landscape, when pre-orders are often opened before potential buyers have even had the chance to see gameplay.

Bender explained that Hooded Horse didn’t like setting prices ahead of release, because “sharing the US price alone will lead to misunderstandings.” This is due to the fact that Steam is using the US Dollar as a currency for other regions as well, but adjusts pricing locally. 

“People will be concluding the game is unaffordable in their region when at launch they will have pricing that will work for them. And whatever disclaimers we’d attach would probably be dropped when it is repeated elsewhere causing a bunch of people to lose hope and feel the game won’t be affordable in their country,” Bender added.

Another reason for keeping the price under wraps, according to the CEO, is the amount of scam and gray market sites trying to take advantage of the excitement around Manor Lords.

“They don’t have any keys, and they aren’t going to be getting any from us,” he wrote. “But they are attempting to capitalize on the hype, and, despite our stance that we are not doing pre-orders because we don’t want to take your money until after release, they are claiming to take pre-orders for key sales.”

Bender wrote that the publisher didn’t want players to get scammed by such actors, “and giving them a definite price to plan around would probably just increase their proliferation and marketing of these ‘pre-orders’.”

Finally, the CEO stressed that Hooded Horse’s established policies would not change because Manor Lords had a lot of hype around it: “I don't think people should be worried about price. As a publisher, Hooded Horse has never done triple-A pricing on a game. We have no current plans to do so, no matter how popular a game is. And for Early Access release we’ve always previously done launch discounts in the range of 10-25% that last for the first couple of weeks.”

In a dig at the pricing policies of triple-A publishers, he added: “We're not trying to squeeze every last dollar out of people, we won't be putting up five editions with a spreadsheet needed to understand them or locking up content into Day 1 DLC or any of that crap. There's going to be a fair price there at launch with a fair discount.”

Check out our Manor Lords Early Access review to learn more about the game.