Windrose, latest surprise smash hit to grace Steam, has blasted past some impressive milestones in its first week of release – amassing an intense 200,000 simultaneous players and 1 million copies sold.
If you are unaware of Windrose, that’s understandable. The pirate-themed survival experience only really been live for a paltry eight days and bears all the cursed marks of a doomed Steam Early Access title. Let’s strike up the band and sing all of those greatest hits:
- Early Access
- Open World
- Online Co-op
- Survival
- Crafting
- Base Building
Oof, what a line up. Seeing these terms together usually conjure images of a broken mess that hardly works, steeped in potential and doomed to be abandoned by the developers in a year or less. But the scallywags at Kraken Express have proved the exception, because Windrose is a banger of a game – and the community is singing shanties of praise.
All one million of them.
The news was posted as a Steam developer update, where the team at Kraken Express directed the appreciation squarely at all the filthy freebooters that made it happen:
Ahoy, captains! We have just plundered another milestone – 1,000,000 copies, and “we” means “you” – a crew of fine brave captains sailing the seas of Windrose. Moreover, today Windrose has assembled over 200,000 concurrent players! Your support for the game is absolutely astonishing, and your patience while we are working on fixes is truly heart-warming. While we keep working on the game, we read your reviews and comments, watch your videos and streams, and sometimes, honestly, shed a pirate-y tear of happiness, because now when the game is out you share our dream of swashbuckling adventure. And there are boars, too, we know, but whatever does not send you flying into the nearest tree, makes you stronger, right?
ㅤ
Thank you for this, captains. You are our inspiration in this journey, and YARRRRR, that’s going to be an exciting one.
It is a deeply refreshing change to see an Early Access title come out the gates with some proper (sea) legs. If Windrose can bear the dreaded black spot of ‘build, craft, survive’ and come out on top, there may just be hope that others can measure the success and emulate it properly.
Huge props to the team at Kraken Express sailing into a face full of wind and coming out ahead.
Are you deep in your own Age of Piracy adventure? Do you have what it takes to swash and/or buckle the deadly wild hogs that claim many a pirate life? Tell us all about it in the comments or on our social media.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
