Games industry in 2024: The obstacles facing indie developers

Manor Lords – a strategy game that puts players in charge of building a Medieval settlement.

It’s sold 4.5 million copies since its early access release in April.

Snow Rui, co-founder of publisher Hooded Horse, puts the game’s success down to the spin it puts on the genre by allowing players to inhabit and walk around the settlements they create.

Manor Lords generated huge pre-release interest based on early trailers, but Snow admits that Hooded Horse was still surprised by its reception.

“It would almost be arrogant not to be taken aback by how successful it turned out to be,” she says.

Snow says one the best pieces of advice she got was “don’t roll too fast” once you’ve found success.

Some of the wider industry’s problems have been blamed on companies expanding too quickly when gaming profits ballooned during the pandemic.

Snow says it’s more important to her to be sustainable over the long-term, and be realistic with your expectations.

“A breakout hit like this, you cannot count on it to repeat itself year after year,” she says.

“There will be people pushing you to have a different expectation or treating the next year as a failure if the breakout hit doesn’t repeat itself but that’s simply not the case.

“So that’s a matter of setting your expectations and centering who you are.”