Windrose devs reveal it sold 500k copies in the first 48 hours – that’s likely Early Access development funded

The team behind Windrose has revealed that the indie game has sold 500k copies in 48 hours of the game going live. The 15-person indie studio has sold the game pretty well, thanks to the hype of its demo going viral over the Steam Next Fest period in February.

How Windrose got its sales

The game also ran a niche marketing campaign where it kept the demo online right until the game’s Early Access launch. It meant that fans could continue hearing about the game, play the demo, and get stuck into the game fairly easily.

In addition, it’s also following along with the Early Access launch discount, hoping to create that FOMO of its cheaper price launch. The game is priced at about £22.50 on our store page, meaning it’s about $27 USD and €27. It’s also region-priced to be much cheaper when converted too, with only the European currencies higher than Sterling. It means that the game is relatively accessible for lots of countries to pick up and play, regardless of purchasing power.

It’s no real surprise that the devs managed to sell this many copies in a short timeframe. The game has bagged around 1.5 million wishlists, at least according to the developers of the game in a Steam community blog post. That’s likely not a completely up-to-date figure, as that post was slightly out of date. We know games tend to get a bit of a wishlist spike right before launch, too, as people want to get notified when games go live in EA for those release time alerts.

Current sales estimation for Windrose

Based on our current estimations, we reckon that the Windrose devs have bagged around £7.875 million, which comes to around $10.6 million USD. That factors in the 30% cut to the Steam platform as normal. The game is also on Epic too, which could eat away at that 30% platform cut as Epic is known to do things a little cheaper to encourage games launching on their platform. So the number is a conservative estimate based on all 500k being on Steam and it being in Sterling first. So the number can fluctuate a little based on all currencies that bought the game at regional pricing. But either way, it’s made quite a few million already.

We double-checked some analytics tools too, and one called Gamalytic’s data feed shows it sold 500k too, with rough revenue estimations. Given it lines up with the Windrose devs’ announcement, it’s likely worth checking that for an idea of how well it is doing.

The weekend is right around the corner too, giving peak gaming hours. The chances of players being able to jump in on the game and push sales even higher are strong, especially with word-of-mouth spreading about the successful launch.

We have no idea if this covers the cost of the project. Road To Vostok ran similar wishlist campaigns, launch discounts, and it made enough money to cover the entire development in its first few days. So, I do wonder if that’s enough for Windrose to keep its 15 staff and studio floating through to 1.0 and beyond?