Manor Lords, a highly anticipated medieval strategy game, releases on April 26, but developer Hooded Horse still has not announced the game’s price point. Why is that? Tim Bender, the CEO of publisher Hooded Horse, provided an answer in a post on Reddit recently (via Kotaku).
Bender said Manor Lords, like other Steam games before it, will have regional price points as part of the game’s worldwide distribution. Because of this, Hooded Horse shied away from revealing the game’s price prior to launch.
“Sharing the US price alone will lead to misunderstandings. People will be concluding the game is unaffordable in their region when at launch they will have pricing that will work for them,” Bender said. “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 also mentioned that keeping the price point a mystery for now could help alleviate issues with “gray market/scam stores” that attempt to sell preorder keys.
“They don’t have any keys, and they aren’t going to be getting any from us. But they are attempting to capitalize on the hype, and, despite our stance that we are NOT doing preorders because we don’t want to take your money until after release, they are claiming to take preorders for key sales,” Bender said. “They have no idea what the price will be, so they are taking their wild guesses and probably figuring they can get a key through some questionable means later (or just leave the customer not getting what they paid for if not perhaps).”
Bender said Hooded Horse is looking out for players and trying to help them avoid getting scammed.
But what will Manor Lords actually be priced at? Bender said no one needs to worry about a steep price. “As a publisher, Hooded Horse has never done AAA pricing on a game. We have no current plans to do so, no matter how popular a game is,” Bender said. “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.”
The discount Bender is referring to pertains to how Manor Lords will launch in Early Access, and customers can expect the price to be about 10%-25% lower over the first couple weeks.
All will be revealed on April 26 when Manor Lords releases on Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. On console, the game will launch in Game Preview, which is similar to Early Access. Game Pass subscribers can play the game at no extra cost when it launches.
