Windrose off to a flyer with good player numbers as the pirate genre gets a new poster child

We first looked at Windrose here at The Escapist at the start of the year when a new demo of the game, formerly known as Crosswinds, was released.

Now, all the evidence seems to be pointing to the fact that Windrose has stuck its launch – it had a decent amount of players wading through the beaches around the High Seas and even has a coveted Very Positive rating on Steam right now.

Windrose player count

The Windrose demo we looked at was interesting because it was the first proper look since the game made a last-minute pivot from PvP to PvE. Crosswinds, the original concept was morphed after alpha testing to Windrose, and it seems to have benefited from the boldness of the devs, at least at this early stage.

You see, fundamentally, we all just want a good pirate game, and while PvP may be gone, all that really means is that we aren’t getting annoyed with griefers, so let’s go.

Currently, Windrose, which has not been live long, has over 25,000 players on it according to SteamDB. While that is nowhere near the number of games such as Mewgenics or Slay the Spire 2, it still propels it into being one of Steam’s most popular games right now, and, at the time of writing, a lot of the world isn’t even up properly yet, so that could still grow.

The last 12 months or so have seen a rich vein of leftfield gaming successes, certainly on the PC, proving that if your product is good enough, people will flock to it – and long may it continue.

Is Windrose on PS5 or Xbox?

At this stage, we are only in the lands of PC Early Access – there is no console version available, nor has there been any real talk of one. Obviously, the subject matter alone would land well on console, but we probably need the Windrose early access period to go really well to entice the publishers into the calm, blue waters of the console market.