Hooded Horse's CEO Tim Bender, who runs publishing duties on several strategy-focused games including Manor Lords, has come out against the idea that every game needs to keep players perpetually hooked with post-launch plans à la a live-service.
In response to a LinkedIn post that claims "Manor Lords is a pretty interesting case-study in the pitfalls of Early Access development when a game with a small team (and heavily marketed as such) hits the reality of a hungry audience" - pointing to the game's falling concurrent player numbers - Tim Bender argues that "this is exactly the kind of distorted endless growth/burden of expectations/line must go up perspective that causes so much trouble in the games industry." (Good spot, Eurogamer.)
