Manor Lords sure took off, huh? Coming out of the gate swinging, the city sim quickly achieved, in the publisher's words, success "well beyond what we could have hoped"—and the wins just keep coming for simulated life among the peasantry.
As shared by publisher Hooded Horse on Twitter, Manor Lords has now hit over 2,000,000 copies sold since its release back in April. The game's solo dev also chimed in to express their gratitude, adding in a quote tweet: "Insane! Thank you for playing".
While it's certainly no Palworld by volume, it has to be appreciated that the city builder—especially a mediaeval city-builder about peasants rolling wagons full of cabbages about—is finding such deep-rooted success. It really does feel as if this is the year of left-field indie games thriving while big-name companies stumble over their own feet. Or, as PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde put it last week, "avoidable mistakes they immediately back down from".
Out of sheer, unadulterated curiosity, I decided to do a google and figure out what the population of the largest city was back in ye olden days of mediaeval England (if you feel put out by this by an American, I regret to inform you that your country wasn't invented yet. There's really not much I can do about that, sorry).
According to the University of Cambridge, 1300s London was estimated to have around 80,000 people clogging up its sprawling streets. In other words, if you wanted to represent the entire rough sum of people who've bought Manor Lords (not including those who might've snagged two copies), you'd have to stack the biggest city of its time period on top of itself 25 times.
Comparatively, Manor Lords itself only allows you to reach a population of around 2,000, so to represent the current player base by volume, you'd have to construct 1,000 villages side-by side. Things would get a little crowded there.
If you want more facts, I regret to inform you that I don't study mediaeval literature. Freelance writer Emily Price does, however, and she recently did a great write-up for us about the accuracy of Manor Lord's mediaeval lifestyle and the day-to-day happenings of the time period's peasantry.
