Windrose
A pirate survival-crafting game with soulslite combat and genuinely great naval battles -- peaked at 222,134 concurrent players in Early Access and earned it.
- //Peaked at 222,134 concurrent players and sold 1 million copies in six days, 1.5 million within a month -- becoming the sixth most-played game on Steam at peak.
- //Started life as Crosswind, a cancelled free-to-play MMO -- the opening two hours still carry visible MMO-onboarding bones the developers haven't fully reworked.
- //Naval combat lets you trade cannon fire at range then close in for boarding actions that transition seamlessly into deck-to-deck fighting.
- //Kraken Express estimates 1.5 to 2.5 years in Early Access, with full release around 2027-2028 and roughly 50% more content than the current build.
- //Published by Pocketpair, who also handled Palworld's Japan release -- a similarly explosive Early Access survival launch.
Windrose puts you in the boots of a pirate captain in an alternative Golden Age of Piracy, building up from nothing through a Valheim-style survival loop of gathering, crafting, and base-building toward owning and customising a warship capable of serious naval combat. Combat uses a parry-and-stagger system the developers call Soulslite, accessible without being trivial, but the real highlight is naval combat: manoeuvring for cannon exchanges at range, then closing in for boarding actions that transition seamlessly from ship combat to deck-to-deck fighting. It launched into Early Access April 2026 from Kraken Express, a first-time studio published by Pocketpair, and became the sixth most-played game on Steam at peak -- behind only Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Slay the Spire 2.
Not 'good for Early Access' -- just good. The naval combat alone is worth the price of admission, and the current build is a genuinely complete game, not a thin vertical slice -- 8-15 hours to reach the current content cap solo, 4-6 in co-op. The opening two hours are genuinely rough, carrying over MMO onboarding bones from the game's cancelled previous life as Crosswind, and launch server issues were real. Both are fixable, neither should stop you buying it now.