Steam week in review: Pragmata and Windrose face off, with sad sci-fi dads proving no match for tree-chopping pirates

Pragmata was meant to own this week. It was the highest profile new release by far and, from the vantage point of a couple of weeks ago, it looked like Capcom’s seventh-gen-evoking sci-fi shooter would have the week to itself.

But it was not to be: pirate-survival timesink Windrose released into early access on April 14 after its release date was surprise-announced the previous week.

Windrose ended up doing very well: at time of writing it’s the second best selling game on Steam right now by revenue, with only Counter-Strike 2 ahead of it. It sold a million copies in six days and currently has over 220,000 concurrent players, which is far higher than—to look at another newish live service game—Marathon’s all-time peak of 88,337.

Yep: the numbers suggest that PC players are hungrier for a good pirate game than they are a new Bungie extraction shooter.

Here’s where things land at the moment to give you some more context for how the week panned out, as per Steam itself. It’s not scientific: Steam doesn’t provide raw numbers, and this real time look comes ahead of the storefront’s weekly top sellers list, which comes out on Tuesdays:

Top five Steam games right now by revenue

It’s no surprise Windrose has done well. People love pirate videogames and pretty much every pirate videogame released over the last decade or so has been divisive at best. Sea of Thieves is a love-it-or-hate-it affair, while Skull & Bones has a lot of annoying limitations. Ubisoft’s much-rumored Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag remake will probably do amazingly well.

But I’m still surprised to see it pull more players than Pragmata on PC according to the metrics available to us. For instance, look at these peak concurrent player counts for the three biggest new games of the week, courtesy of SteamDB.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Pragmata also released on PS5 and Xbox, while Windrose is an early access PC-only game at present. Nor do I present the numbers above as a means to demonstrate that Pragmata is a failure—early signs suggest it certainly isn’t! But it’s a good demonstration of how wildly popular Windrose has proven to be.

There aren’t any other big surprises this week: Forza Horizon 6 pre-orders are going very well at over 500,000 units shifted. Road to Vostok, a Finnish indie first-person take on the extraction shooter, was the 12th best selling game between April 7 and 14 on Steam, but is sitting right now at 43rd.

Last week’s Steam deep cuts

Best Steam user review of the week

“This is my Chair. There are many like it, but this one is mine” – ItzBothNet on Office Chair Curling