Pirate adventure game Windrose is an early access hit, #1 best-seller on Steam with nearly 100K concurrents

PVE pirate survival game Windrose has beckoned to players, calling tens of thousands of PC gamers to the high seas--and pushing the game to the top spot on Steam's best-sellers charts.

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In an age where AAA games are sinking left and right, Windrose looks to be the next indie early access hit to help the games industry stay afloat. The 18th century pirate sim goes right up against the likes of Ubisoft's Skull & Bones, offering exploration, ship-to-ship naval combat, co-op, MMO-style resource gathering, and direct third-person land combat complete with dodges and rolls.

So far the game is doing incredibly well in early access, where it has taken Steam's top #1 best-seller spot, beating out Valve's seemingly-immortal Counter-Strike 2. At the time of writing, Windrose has accumulated 97,981 concurrent players in 24 hours. The dev team behind the game says that over 500K people actually played the game in the last 48 hours. The demand for these kinds of games is clearly here, as expressed with long-running live games like Rare's Sea of Thieves.

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It's still early days for the game, and Kraken Express, the dev team behind Windrose, say that the final game will have substantially more content than what's offered in the current $26.99 EA version.

"We plan that the full version will have around 50% more content: more biomes, bosses, enemies, ships, loot, etc. The story is supposed to continue, unfolding into an epic adventure with a satisfying finale. That said, we also want to explore additional gameplay systems, not just adding the content into the existing ones."

The team also plans to release a console version, but there's no official date set. For right now, Kraken is focused on the PC version.

Check below for more info on the game:

Windrose is a survival adventure set in an alternative Age of Piracy. It features the classic "build, craft, survive" formula along with intense combat and engaging exploration on land and sea.

Progress through vast procedurally generated biomes filled with hidden mysteries, hand-crafted dungeons and quests. Gather your crew and captain your ship through brutal naval combat with boarding actions and seamless transitions between ship and shore.

Defeat challenging bosses on your swashbuckling adventure driven by real-world characters and supernatural forces alike.