Manor Lords is currently the great hope of fans of building games. The medieval simulation has secured first place among the most wanted games on Steam and it is also very popular on Twitch.
What game is it about? Manor Lords is a medieval building game developed by solo dev Slavic Magic. The simulation promises detailed city construction, massive battles and complex economic and social systems. The whole thing should be presented in pretty impressive graphics – especially for a solo project.
These factors make Manor Lords currently the most wanted game on Steam – even ahead of the hotly anticipated Hades 2. According to publisher Hooded Horse, a whopping 2.5 million people now have the game on their wish list (via X).
From April 26, 2024, PC players will finally be able to form their own opinion, as Manor Lords will officially start early access. An Xbox release will follow at a later date. Some streamers have been busy gaming since April 12th – especially two well-known faces.
By the way, the verdict of the GameStar colleagues on Manor Lords is: “So far it lives up to the hype.”
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A success on Twitch even before it was released
Who are the streamers? Looking at the past 7 days since Manor Lords launched for content creators, the most watched streamers for the game are two Germans: Gronkh and Maurice Weber. By the way, Manor Lords itself takes third place in the “Trending Games” (via SullyGnome).
Maurice is a talented member of the Webedia network, which also includes MeinMMO, GameStar and GamePro.
This is a pretty tough achievement, especially for Gronkh, because he has only played the game in one stream for around 8 hours so far – but he has gathered so many fans that he is ahead in terms of both average viewers and watch time.
However, the streaming veteran regularly proves with new releases that he can also play at the top internationally – most recently with the surprise hit Palworld.
However, if you look at the numbers for the last 3 days, both of them were ousted – neither Maurice nor Gronkh played Manor Lords during this time. Only the streamer JenNyan represents the German scene in the top 10 (via SullyGnome).
“It’s almost as if the entire civilization depends on oxen”
What does Gronkh say about the game? He seemed to like the medieval simulation, but he ended the game at short notice when he lost two of his oxen in a fire. According to the streamer, they are still too much of a bottleneck in the game at the moment: without the farm animals you can’t do anything at all.
“It’s almost as if the entire civilization depends on oxen,” grouses Gronkh, “but they’re dying left and right.” (via Gronkh.tv)
“An exceptional building game”
What does Maurice say? Manor Lords obviously liked that. He hasn’t shown a game so much on Twitch in the last month (via SullyGnome). He had already raved about the build-up game in advance. In his detailed test stream on April 14th, he summed up: “An exceptional build-up game.”
He has now played it for 30 hours and had a lot of fun, says Maurice. However, one would be doing Manor Lords a disservice by overestimating it. It is not the “ultimate development game” at this point in time.
The colleague particularly mentions the late game as a construction site, as there simply isn’t enough content at the moment. Maurice currently still lacks long-term motivation.
However, he also praises some factors that no other building game would offer. He was particularly impressed by the design: it really can’t be emphasized enough. “In no other game can you build such a beautiful settlement,” enthuses Maurice.
Now it remains to be seen whether he can fight his way back into the top 3 of “Manor Lord” streamers over the weekend. Over the course of the week, Maurice was apparently a bit distracted: First he had to play Frostpunk 2 and then he was also named Player of the Year at the German Computer Game Awards (via GameStar).
The fact that a simulation like Manor Lords is so well received by German-speaking audiences, of all people, seems to once again confirm an old cliché: Germans simply love to work hard in their video games. This is also suggested by the statistics that the space MMO Star Citizen recently published:
Star Citizen shows exciting figures: Germans love the space MMO and fulfill a typical cliché in the game