Windrose just hit #1 on Steam. It also hard-crashes every three minutes.

That’s not a rough estimate — it’s the top-rated review on the game’s own Steam page, written by a player who managed 36 minutes before the instability became unbearable. Right below it sits another negative review from someone with nearly 33 hours played, describing a brick-wall difficulty spike at the first boss that killed their momentum even after dropping the difficulty setting.

And yet: 92,748 concurrent players. #1 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart, ahead of Counter-Strike 2. Over 500,000 copies sold in 48 hours, according to publisher Pocketpair. An 89% “Very Positive” rating across 3,370 reviews. The math doesn’t lie. Players are showing up in force for a game that, by multiple accounts, barely holds together.

How We Got Here

Windrose is a PvE pirate survival sandbox from Kraken Express, a studio based in Uzbekistan, co-published by Pocketpair — the Japanese company behind Palworld’s similarly explosive Early Access launch. It dropped into Early Access on April 14, 2026, priced at $26.99 (a 10% launch discount off the $29.99 standard price).

The pitch is straightforward: Age of Piracy open world, ship-to-ship naval combat, souls-adjacent third-person melee, co-op multiplayer, crafting, base-building, and boss encounters. PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston compared the naval combat to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which is the kind of comparison that moves units in this genre.

But Windrose didn’t come out of nowhere. The demo topped the Steam Next Fest charts and racked up 1.5 million wishlists before launch day. The demand was real. The question was whether the game could survive contact with players.

What’s Actually Good

Plenty, according to the reviews that aren’t reporting crashes. The top positive review doesn’t mince words: “This is the definitive pirate game, Just logged out at Tortuga, and man the ocean feels so alive.” Another calls it a game where “even in the early access it feels finished, especially if you compare with other early access games.”

The survival mechanics, the density of world activities, the ship-to-ship combat — enough players are raving about these elements that the appeal is undeniable. At $27 for an Early Access build that Kraken Express says will grow by roughly 50% more content for the full release (new biomes, bosses, enemies, ships, and a complete story arc), the value proposition is strong.

In a genre where Sea of Thieves has had years to iterate and Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones mostly disappointed, Windrose is filling a gap that players have been shouting about for years.

What’s Falling Apart

The technical situation is messy. Kraken Express acknowledged the chaos on Discord, writing that “most of the issues seem to be related to P2P coop and dedicated servers” and that the sheer volume of players — over 60,000 simultaneous at any given moment — has made it impossible to address everything immediately.

According to VGTimes, journalists tracing the connectivity problems discovered that the game’s server code contains a domain name routing traffic through a Moscow-based IP address. That routing has caused some ISPs to blacklist game services entirely, severing connections. Kraken Express hasn’t publicly addressed the Russia routing, though the studio acknowledged that “locks” are part of the problem.

The difficulty spike at the first boss is a separate issue — a design tuning problem that Early Access exists to surface. But when your second-most-visible review is from someone with 33 hours who hit a wall and quit, that’s not a great look for onboarding.

The Real Story

500,000 people bought Windrose in two days, crashes and all. They knew it was Early Access. They read the reviews. They saw the server complaints flooding Discord and social media. None of it stopped them.

The lesson isn’t that studios should ship broken games. It’s that there’s a threshold of compelling underneath a rough launch, and Windrose is well above it. When a game delivers naval combat that feels like Black Flag, an open world that players describe as “alive,” and a survival loop that actually works — players will tolerate a lot. Palworld proved this. Windrose is proving it again.

Kraken Express has a genuine hit. Whether they can stabilize servers, fix the crashes, and tune the boss encounters before the honeymoon ends — that’s the next fight. The players showed up. Now the game has to catch up.

Sources