Gaming: Ceo Of Manor Lords Publisher Hooded Horse Wants It To Be 'a...

The indie publisher keeps striking gold, but CEO Tim Bender is still "fundamentally unambitious", prizing stability and ethics over massive growth and profits.

Even if you've only got a passing interest in strategy and management games, you've almost certainly encountered Hooded Horse before—it's the publisher behind Manor Lords, Against the Storm, Endless Legend 2 and 9 Kings, to name but a few. It started in 2019, and since then it's published a slew of successes. It's rare that I don't have a Hooded Horse game in rotation these days.

One of the things that makes its success so surprising—though I'm beginning to think it's one of the core reasons it's done so well—is that Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender started the company with no industry experience, aside from his passion for modding.

"I did a bunch of different things, so I bounced around a lot," Bender tells me. "I don't think I was particularly reliable in terms of career orientation."

He graduated from college early, went to law school at Stanford, spent a year as a lawyer, then went back to school (to Harvard this time) to do a master's degree in Regional Studies: East Asia. A two-year-stint as a consultant at McKinsey followed, and then he was back at Harvard again, to do a PhD in ancient Chinese history.

Bender never finished his PhD, getting a terminal master's degree instead. He then moved in with his wife, Hooded Horse president and CFO Snow Rui, and modded as a hobby. You might have encountered his Viking Conquest Balance Mod for Mount & Blade, which has been downloaded over 40,000 times on ModDB.

"I was like, I'm just gonna change 13 little numbers that bothered me, and then I just got absorbed into it," says Bender. By version 13, the changelog had grown to 20 pages, "where I was doing things like causing Odin to come in and reward you when you did certain things in tournaments".

The ways in which [game] publishing contracts are generally written violate a lot of principles of what's an efficient contract.

The mod was released in 2018. A year later, he was the CEO of a publisher.

One of the things that stands out about Hooded Horse is its approach to contracts, offering very favourable terms to developers. It's where Bender's legal background comes in handy.

Source: PC Gamer