Manor Lords recently celebrated hitting 2.5 million sales with an update and a hefty discount, but it’s not the only strategy gem from publisher Hooded Horse that’s dominating the charts.Heading Hooded Horse’s sales for the year right behind Manor Lords with 1.2 copies sold is Against the Storm, another successful city builder with a stellar rating of “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam. Together, the two games could make up almost all of the publisher’s 4.5 million sales over the last 12 months – but they’re not the only smash-hit strategy titles from Hooded Horse proving to be successful this year.Empires of the Undergrowth, a personal favorite of mine in which you lead ant colonies, has sold almost half a million copies with over 450,000 sales to date. Norland, another medieval strategy game with more sex, drama, and Game of Thrones-style backstabbing, has managed to sell more than 300,000 copies since its early access debut this summer. It’s mind-boggling numbers all around, and it’…

Fntastic, the studio behind the failed extraction shooter that was supposed to be an MMO and ultimately tanked the whole studio, has relaunched as Fntastic 2.0 with a “plan for recovery” that includes a new crowdfunded co-op “escape game”.From Steam’s most-anticipated MMO to a bland, empty survival shooter that killed a studio, The Day Before is a deeply weird game. You can hit that link to read the whole bizarre story, but it includes a nine-month delay due to a trademark issue, a catastrophic launch met with damning reviews and complaints from players that it wasn’t an MMO as originally marketed, seemingly scrubbed genre tags, and then Fntastic’s abrupt closure four days after launch. The Day Before was pulled from Steam the same day.The ensuing fallout lasted for weeks and included allegations from former staff of awful working conditions and mismanagement to the extent that some devs didn’t know they were supposed to be making an MMO and inflammatory comments from the studio blamin…