Steam's most-anticipated city-builder racks up another 500,000 wishlists - after solo dev's girlfriend guessed it would only get 7,000 total

Manor Lords, the hotly-anticipated medieval city-builder that recently became the most-wishlisted game on Steam, has gained 500,000 prospective players in the past three months - far more than its solo developer's girlfriend predicted it would ever gain.

Yesterday, Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse confirmed that it had hit 2.5 million wishlists on Steam, a milestone likely hit off the back of the news that the strategy game had overtaken Hades 2 to become the most-anticipated game on Valve's platform. It's an impressive feat - many of the top-performing games on the wishlist chart are sequels to beloved games - Hades, Hollow Knight, Ark, Frostpunk, and Stalker all maintain a presence in the top ten, but Manor Lords sits ahead of all of them.

An upcoming release date is also likely to be a factor in that success - Manor Lords is the earliest release in that top ten. Due to release into early access on April 26, it's a long way ahead of the next game down the chronological pecking order: Frostpunk 2 is due to launch at the end of July.

Two aspects of Manor Lords' development make its success extra enjoyable to behold: the first is that it was created by a single developer, one who looks set to have a Stardew Valley-esque life transformation in a couple of weeks. The other is the fact that this success story seems so unexpected. Back when Manor Lords hit two million wishlists in January, solo developer Greg Styczeń said that his girlfriend only ever expected the game to rack up 7,000 wishlists. That guess was made in 2020, and while it's been a long time since then, that number has been proved very wrong - Manor Lords has racked up over 70 times more wishlists than that in the last three months alone.

I played the medieval city builder-meets-RTS game that has 2 million wishlists on Steam and it blew my tiny mind.