When Ubisoft shipped Skull and Bones in 2024 after years of delays and a reported $200 million budget, it peaked at just 2,615 concurrent players on Steam. This week, a debut title from a small studio called Kraken Express did something the French publishing giant couldn’t: it gave pirate game fans exactly what they’d been asking for. Windrose launched into Steam Early Access on April 14 and within hours had more than 69,000 people sailing its seas, a number that dwarfs Skull and Bones’ all-time Steam peak by over 26 times.
What Is Windrose?
Windrose is an open-world survival adventure set in an alternative Age of Piracy. Its core loop blends the “build, craft, survive” formula with naval combat, soulslike melee mechanics, and deep open-world exploration across procedurally generated biomes. You play as a pirate captain who dares to challenge Blackbeard, what starts as a story of survival and revenge gradually pulls you into a larger conflict involving rival empires, pirate factions, and supernatural forces lurking at the edges of the map.
The game supports up to 8 players in co-op (though the developers recommend groups of 4 for the best performance), and is fully playable solo with an NPC crew. You can build everything from simple shelters to full fortresses, craft and customize ships equipped with cannons and crew weapons, and engage in naval combat that players describe as sitting somewhere between Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s streamlined broadsides and Sea of Thieves’ more hands-on approach. When you board a ship, the game transitions seamlessly from sea to deck-level melee, no loading screens, no awkward cutscenes.
High-profile streamers including Asmongold and Cohh Carnage spent dozens of hours in the pre-launch demo, giving the game significant visibility before release. The Steam Next Fest demo in February 2026 alone attracted over 800,000 players, and proved popular enough that the developers left it live through to launch day.
Windrose is the debut release from Kraken Express (formerly known as Windrose Crew. They renamed themselves at launch because, as the team admitted, “it just sounds cooler”). The studio had no prior commercial releases, which makes the launch numbers even more remarkable.
That said, Windrose itself wasn’t built overnight. It began life as an entirely different project: a free-to-play MMO called Crosswind. The pivot away from that model was a significant decision, the team scrapped most of the existing work and rebuilt the game from scratch as a buy-to-play PvE survival title. Producer Phil explained the reasoning: maintaining a live-service free-to-play game demands a constant pipeline of monetization content, resources the studio could better spend on making the core game actually good. Players who had followed the project since its Crosswind days apparently agreed, the buy-to-play model was what many of them had been requesting.
Windrose is published by Kraken Express themselves, with Pocketpair (the Palworld studio) handling Japanese publishing rights. The Pocketpair involvement is a meaningful signal: the studio behind one of Steam’s most explosive Early Access launches presumably knows what a successful one looks like.
How Is It Doing, Really?
By the numbers: over 4,400 Steam reviews at the time of writing, sitting at “Very Positive” with approximately 88% approval. The game reached nearly 80,000 concurrent players within the first day, has topped the Steam bestsellers chart, and is available on STOVE (Smilegate’s platform) with 1.6 million pre-registrations globally.
Critics have been largely enthusiastic. PC Gamer, GameSpot, and Prima Games all published early impressions praising the polish of the Early Access build, which reviewers noted feels surprisingly complete for a survival game at this stage. The movement is described as smooth, building mechanics as intuitive, and naval combat as the standout feature. Common criticisms include the talent tree feeling slow and early-game combat being somewhat unbalanced, but these are the kinds of issues routinely addressed during Early Access development.
The game plans to remain in Early Access for between 1.5 and 2.5 years, with the current build representing roughly half of the planned content. The price is $29.99 (discounted to $26.99 at launch).
Will It Come to Consoles?
The developers have been refreshingly direct about this. A Kraken Express spokesperson told GameSpot: the team is “enthusiastic about eventually coming to consoles but are focused on 1.0 launch first.” There are no current console announcements, and no platform confirmations for PS5 or Xbox.
The honest interpretation here is that console is a genuine aspiration, not a marketing throwaway. The studio is taking the sensible path that many successful Early Access developers follow: ship a stable PC 1.0 first, then expand platforms once the game is finished and certified. Given the audience numbers and commercial momentum Windrose is building, a console release post-1.0 is plausible, though the 1.5–2.5 year Early Access window means console players would likely be looking at 2028 at the earliest.
The Bigger Picture
The pirate game genre has been genuinely underserved. Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remains the benchmark more than a decade after its 2013 release, Sea of Thieves occupies a different (more casual, social) niche, and Skull and Bones was a high-profile disappointment. Windrose has walked into that gap with confidence.
What’s particularly notable is that this happened through genuine grassroots excitement: viral demo footage, community word-of-mouth, and a developer that listened to its audience and pivoted away from a monetization model players didn’t want. The Pocketpair publishing partnership added credibility and reach, but the momentum was already there before that deal was announced.
For a debut title from a previously unknown studio, Windrose’s Early Access launch is exceptional. Whether it sustains that momentum through a full 1.0 release — and eventually finds its way to consoles — remains to be seen. But right now, on the sea of Early Access launches, Windrose is flying a lot of flags.
