0:00 There is nothing that I love more than watching a 60 person indie team absolutely body a company that burned what 10 years 400 developers and half a billion dollars trying to achieve the exact same thing quadruple a gaming a Ubisoft one of the most interesting things that I think that I've seen over the past couple of years is how often the games industry will just let opportunity pass them by some of the most obvious opportunities pass them by. I'm talking about free money, free engagement, free players, gamers that are telling these guys exactly what they want in full detail, but blinded by their arrogance, the industry just walks in the opposite direction. Windrose has been absolutely dominating. The players keep going up, the sales keep going up,
0:46 people are loving it. And I view this as like one of the most obvious successes, one of the most just handed on a silver platter successes that we have seen in years. But a lot of people are caught surprised by it. What? How could this have happened? How could the thing that players have been asking for been the thing that they wanted? Who would have guessed? You have games journalists that are out there that are talking about it how it's a surprise indie hit saying that this game just essentially came out of nowhere. You got a games industry that would have never looked in the direction of a game like this. And I'm sitting here wondering how anybody could have thought that this was anything but inevitable at this point. This game sold 500,000 copies in its
1:32 first two days. Wow, what a surprise. No, players were asking for it. You weren't listening. So, today I want to talk about why the games industry was caught by surprise when it comes to Windows. I want to talk about well, why the players actually saw this game from a mile away and how I think games like this are exactly how this industry gets replaced. But before that, a word from today's sponsor, Displate, who actually sent over a custom Displate of my very own. and I wanted to show it off to you guys today. How about that? Today's video is sponsored by Displate. And by now you guys already know the deal. These guys have been a regular on the channel for a reason. This time I want to talk to you guys about custom disc plates because I
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3:05 deal. Thank you to Displate for sponsoring today's video. You know, for all the complaining that I do about the games industry, I think the reason why it gets under my skin so much is because I just cannot stand watching somebody leave the front door wide open and just watching their customers just walk right out. especially in the games industry where they have to be the most easiest audience to be able to sell to. These guys will tell you everything that they want. Well, yes, I know that not every single customer is going to say the exact same thing. I get that. But when you have enough of these guys that are saying the same thing, when they're asking for the same thing and they're also spending their money the same way, I think it becomes pretty obvious where the problem is. And man, indie games, they are more than happy to take those complaints off your hands. Actually, the producer of Windrose laid this contrast out earlier this month in an interview
3:51 with Automaton where they were asked how the game had started as a free-to-play MMO and then later shifted to a buytoplay survival game and what had motivated that change. The producer, Phil, had said that the game was always going to be survival focus, but they weren't sure that they'd be able to handle the costs or the ambition with live service. And more importantly, he then went and said the one thing that I think the games industry is apparently allergic to hearing, which is the players wanted something else. Quoting him directly, he said, "More importantly, it seems that the majority of players who were attracted to the game initially preferred to have it this way, too. A buytoplay PvE adventure. We are very happy that the players requests in our own vision over overlapped here." That is a massive choice for any project to make and it mirrors Crimson Desert almost perfectly in this case because
4:37 both of these games were initially aiming at that live service MMO territory, but then both of them pivoted away from that. And both of them ended up doing the one thing that the games industry keeps pretending is the most terrifying gamble ever, listening to players and selling them a premium game that they actually wanted. And in both cases, that decision paid off. Winrose launched into early access on April 14th. that sold 500,000 copies in its first two days, and then it just kept climbing. The player counts kept going up, the sales kept going up. The game pushed past 220,000 concurrent players on Steam, hit 1 million copies sold in under a week. And now it looks like it's on pace to be able to crush those numbers by the time that this game reaches its full release in the next year or so. Because man, what a game they made. You guys already know how much I enjoy early access games. There
5:24 is something I don't really know exactly what it is. It's just something that's really charming about playing these games in their earliest state when it's a little unbalanced, maybe a little bit wonky, probably a lot of wonky in some cases, and you're getting to throw feedback into the mix before everything is locked in. That's supposed to be the whole point of early access. It's a period where these developers should be the most open to feedback because, well, it's when the game is still taking its shape. But I'm just going to be straight up with you guys. Wind Rose has to be one of the most polished early access games that I have played outside of the usual monsters like Slay the Spire or Hades. This game has pretty much everything that you would want out of a survival game. And it just goes even further with that with its pirate fantasy. The base building is so intuitive and flexible. It kind of reminds me of Enred in a lot of ways, though it's not nearly as involved in that. The exploration is packed with a
6:10 ton of stuff for you to be able to find. You have hidden objectives, bosses, encounters dungeons caves hidden chests, and world events. All kinds of different things to do. It has actual build diversity. You can find different weapons and weapon effects and rare weapons and gear sets and a bunch of different ways to upgrade, craft, buy, and build out your character. There are reputation systems with pirates and smuggling factions, bounties, main quests, side quests. And on top of all that, this game has some of the best naval combat that I think that we have seen since Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Should our adventure upon the rage in true hearts of hope we British will push the sea. >> I think the best way that I can describe why so many people have connected with
6:56 this game on such a broad scale is because Windrose it kind of feels like a game that was made by people who have been dressing up like Jack Sparrow every single Halloween for the past 10 years. This is not a game with a pirate skin stretched over it. This is a game made by people who were fully bought into the fantasy. It feels like it was made by people who just really love pirate [ __ ] really love video games, and then just managed to smash those two things together in just the right way. Whether it's the art style, whether it's sailing across the water, whether it's the sound design, the playlist of absurdly good sea shanties that are on the ship that I could just never turn off, or the souls adjacent combat that they put in where even a level one board can just send you into the shadow realm. This game just keeps delivering because none of it feels fake. None of it feels like it's some type of hollow marketing angle. All
7:43 of this feels genuine. I feel that. The players feel that and that's exactly why this game has been doing so well. A lot of people were asking for a game like this. These developers showed up and they answered that call and the players showed up for it immediately. The rest of the industry somehow didn't see this coming. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just living in my own little bubble and the algorithm just isn't feeding me what it's supposed to. But I thought it was really strange how games media was kind of silent when this game dropped. There was some demo coverage, some light demo coverage at the very beginning, mostly from smaller outlets. But once the full game hit and it started exploding, the response to this felt weirdly muted for whatever reason. And that only really stood out to me as the days went on because this game was selling like crazy. It was pulling huge player numbers. It was sitting in the top five most played games on Steam for almost an
8:28 entire week. and the coverage still barely matched what was happening outside of Kotaku calling the game a surprised hit, which from my perspective, it's only a surprise if you're not paying attention. But most of these bigger outlets really didn't move on this until after the game had already crossed a million copies sold. Once it did, well, then it became impossible to ignore and we started seeing the PC Gamer articles and the IGN writeups and the reviews in progress. All this stuff coming after the audience had already made this story obvious to them. And I think that says a lot about how out of step games media has become with the people that are actually buying and playing these games. And honestly, I really didn't take much notice of this. And the disconnect really didn't hit me too hard until I had started looking at the game's trailers and I saw that IGN's upload was sitting at 245,000 views, which I felt was really low for a game
9:15 this big. But then I started scrolling down a little bit further and I saw that Asmin Gold's reaction was sitting near a million views. And this is a lot more than just big streamer is getting views. It's a lot worse than that. This is an issue. At least I mean it's not that much of an issue for us. It's definitely an issue for them. But the issue is what one guy in a room reacting to a trailer is feeling a lot more relevant and a lot more worth listening to than an entire media machine that is supposed to be built around covering these games. This is what it looks like when the conversation no longer involves the press. This is what it looks like when these guys are on the outside. Now, the other thing that I took notice of too is that nearly all the coverage over the past week has gone to Pragmata, which to be fair, it is an incredible game. I absolutely love it. But Windowrose sold the same amount, at least so we know so
10:01 far, it's just as popular, maybe even more popular in some cases. And still, it felt like this game had to claw its way into the conversation. And I think part of that is just coming down to the fact that Windrose is not really giving these guys the kind of angle that they like to run with. They can't squeeze out headlines about how Pragmata's twitchy mode is a dog whistle or write another piece about how they're tired of quote seeing men protecting little girls to prove their masculinity. So instead of getting in front of Win Rose instead of recognizing it for what it was when it was happening, they waited. The players are the ones that forced these guys to respond. They didn't support it. They reacted to it. And the more obvious these successes start looking to players, the more they find them first. the worse this industry looks for not seeing them, especially when so much of that feels intentional.
10:48 Now, while I'm sure some of this has likely something to do with the fact that these guys are not getting review copies of these games or early access games, you're really not going to get that. But it does go to prove that the less access they get, the less likely you are to be able to get any coverage. And you know, in the background over the years, I've been talking to a lot of people that are in games media just because of everything that's been happening in the games industry. And a lot of these guys will tell me straight up that the reason things look like this is because well, a lot of this stuff is in the editor's hands. And even if they bring them stories, breaking news that they find, games that are breaking out or whatever it might be, they just won't run it because the priority is AAA before anything else unless something comes along and forces them to pivot. Basically, has to be something that's making a big enough splash for these guys to be able to take notice of it. And none of it's organic. None of it's based
11:34 on instinct. None of it has anything to do with what players are talking about or what players are interested in. In a lot of cases, these guys are just ignoring it. That is not a good way to do business. That is definitely not a good way to do journalism. I'll tell you that right now. But, you know, I also think the other problem that these guys are running into, especially when it comes to just general relevance at this point, is that with how indie games have been taking over the games industry, games media is just not built to be able to follow them. They don't get the early access. They don't get a lot of access to begin with. They're basically on even footing as the players and because they're not listening to the audience. They're always a mile behind us. You know, I didn't really take notice of all this until over the last week, I was like, man, Pragmata is all over the news and a lot of this stuff is culture war clickbait more than anything else. So, I
12:20 reached out to a couple of writers and these guys just told me straight up, oh yeah, we're trying to squeeze water from a stone right now. None of it's real. What is the point? You know, this also makes me think that like this is not just a media issue. This is an industrywide issue. You're seeing a insane disconnect between the audience and the industries at large. Because I think a game like this goes to prove that the people that are writing about games, selling games, and funding games have absolutely no clue what players are interested in or what they're actually playing. And when you have an industry that is that disconnected, eventually you're going to start leaving gaps, big gaps, like, I don't know, 200,000 views on a trailer versus a million views on a trailer or in the case of the games
13:06 industry, well, an entire market that's up for grabs. Now, I don't think of Windows as just another hit game. I view this as one of the clearest examples that we have seen in years of an industry that's just been completely left wide open for anybody else to take. I mean, I think the demand for a game like this is more than obvious. Assassin's Creed Black Flag, which for a lot of people, they view it as the peak of the franchise. That came out back in 2013. And by 2026, Ubisoft had said that game had reached 34 million players. Now, in this case, I'm actually going to give Ubisoft a little bit of credit here and say that number is probably not all that far off from the actual copies they moved because, well, the game did sell 11 million copies in its first year. Notice how they still used copies sold back then. Sea of Thieves announced 40 million players across all platforms back in 2024. I mean, pirate games have
13:53 always kind of been a big thing for a lot of people. Survival games have been huge for years. It's been one of the most popular genres in gaming. So, a survival pirate game kind of feels like it's one of the most obvious combinations possible right now. Which raises the question, why the hell is an indie studio the one that's leading the charge instead of the AAA companies that were in a perfect position to be able to do so? Well, as you probably guessed it, it's because those companies have spent years trying to tell their players what they want, or they're using data analysts to try to predict what they think that they want instead of actually just paying attention to what the audience is actually asking for. Ubisoft is the perfect example. In my eyes, they were the king of pirate games with Black Flag. They set the standard in a lot of cases, and they clearly saw interest
14:38 when they made that game. But instead of giving players more of what they actually wanted, or building on that foundation in a meaningful way, these idiots tried to force a square peg through a round hole with Skull and Bones, the first quadruple AAA live service game, one of the most aggressively monetized games in recent memory. And well, it was a pirate game that locks players into naval combat only, and still somehow manages to screw that up. The naval combat in Black Flag is so much better than Skull and Bones that it genuinely doesn't even make any sense that this actually came from the same publisher. Now, to Ubisoft's credit, and I can't believe I'm saying that twice in one video, they do seem to be seeing the light a little bit. Guys, I think bullying these companies might actually be working. Even I'll say that the Black Flag remake looks like it's shaping up really well, as long as you don't look
15:23 at the trailer too closely and realize how cartoonish and wonky some of the animations look. can also take too long to think about that it's also being made by the same people that made Skull and Bones, but that's neither here nor there. But man, I just want to say, look at what it takes for these guys to be able to answer player demand. Either you're going to get a soulless live service mess or you're going to get a remake of a game that came out over a decade ago. And I think a lot of this, a lot of their problems, a lot of the industry's problems is coming down to not only these guys just not being able to read the room, but also how absurdly slow they are to move when demand is right in front of them. You guys know that Windrosees was supposed to be an MMO and then they just turned on a dime. Within a year, they shifted to a premium survival game because they saw what players were asking for. They also saw live service
16:08 games falling on their face all over the place and they made the right call. It paid off for these guys. The wider industry just seems incapable of learning from the people that are doing it better than them right now. They can't learn from these indies. They can't learn from the past that built their own companies. and they just keep staring straight into icebergs like it's something that they can't avoid. It's like these guys are convinced that we are the ones that are wrong and eventually we are going to come crawling back to them. I mean, hell, as I'm saying this right now, Xbox is turning the canceled Halo Battle Royale that they were making Halo now is going to be an extraction shooter. These guys just won't stop hitting themselves. You know, honestly, now that I think about it, I don't even think the problem is the genres these guys are chasing. I don't think that it's pirate games or extraction shooters or survival games or
16:54 anything else on paper. I honestly think the real problem is just there's no authentic desire behind anything these guys are making. Like I can already hear some of these executives at Ubisoft going like, "Oh man, what the hell? Why is Windrose doing so well when we made a pirate game too?" question mark. The answer is so simple. Windrose was trying to deliver an experience that the player values while Ubisoft was trying to deliver an experience that increased their value. And those two things only drift this far apart when the company's bottom line matters a hell of a lot more than the game or the customer. Windrose delivers on a fantasy. It's not chasing a trend. It's not trying to reverse engineer engagement or anything like that. It's just a well-made game, even in early access, a lot better than a lot of games, that was sold at a fair price. Players are going to connect with that a
17:39 hell of a lot more than they're going to connect with a game that's asking whether or not they want to spend $50 on premium currency so that they can change the color of their ship cannons. Like, how do these guys not see this? And I think this is how they lose the industry. Not in one big dramatic moment where we're all going to wake up overnight and all the old guard is gone, but just slowly, piece by piece as these guys continue to surrender ground that they already had. I think that's what makes this all so embarrassing to me. These guys are not getting beaten out of spaces that they never touched. They're giving up territory that they already owned. They were already making these games. They had that audience. They had the money and the history. They had the proof of concept for the games that they were already looking for. And instead of building on any of that, they kept walking away to go chase somebody else's bag, somebody else's trend, somebody else's fantasy of infinite growth and
18:25 impossible potential that they could get out of live service. And every single time they do that, all they're doing is just leaving another opening behind them, another huge stretch of empty waters for these smaller studios to sail right into. See, there's the pirate reference for the video. This is not just an indie win. I think this is a living example of how relevance is changing hands right now. These big guys are way too slow. They're way too safe. They're more artificial. They're all into forecasting and risk management. Nothing that has anything to do with the audience. While these smaller teams, these guys are actually hungry. They're focused. They are in love with what they're making. And I think that difference shows. I think that you can feel it in the games almost immediately. And the truth is indies, these guys are just going to innovate a lot harder in these spaces because these guys simply just want it more. Their
19:11 teams are so much smaller. Their vision is so much more focused. There are fewer hands in the pot, fewer people trying to turn a fantasy into a monetization model before that game was even made fun. So the final product is feeling a lot more honest, a lot more direct, and a lot more alive. And honestly, I feel like it actually feels like older games in a lot of ways. This is how these guys are losing their relevance. This is how they lose their territory. And if these companies keep ignoring people, the people that are actually buying these games, then Windrose is not going to be some exception. It's just going to be another warning of what's coming next. You know what? I'll put it into perspective for you guys. This would be like if Bungie abandoned Destiny and just left that space wide open for anybody else to just slide in and steal that audience. It would be like if Borderlands was absolutely garbage and now the looter shooter genre is wide
19:57 open for anybody else to just walk in and take it. It would be like, oh, I don't know if Boware couldn't make a good game. And now all of a sudden you have companies like Larion that have come in and basically taken away the entire Dragon Age audience. And then you have Alcat that's waiting in the wings looking to take their Mass Effect audience as well. This is already happening. It's been happening for quite a while now. These guys have been surrendering territory at an alarming rate. And it's something that's going to really come back to bite these guys in the ass, especially because they're the ones that left the door open. They're the ones that let the wolves in. And now the wolves are in. And these wolves are hungry. Luckily enough for us, they're also friendly. It's probably not the best analogy for me to be able to use, but it's crazy to see how much wasted potential there is here. I think that's probably the thing that bothers me the
20:42 most because these guys had the money, they had the infrastructure, they had the experience. Most importantly, they had the talent in a lot of cases and they squandered it. These are spaces that these guys pioneered. These are genres that these guys pioneered and they walked away from. They fumbled the bag all because they were more worried about what somebody else had rather than what they already had. Avarice greed. That's what their issue is. Largely being piloted by people that have no idea what they're doing. But I think this is only going to get worse because game development has become that much more accessible to more and more people. It's getting cheaper to do for a lot of people as well, even though the industry likes to pretend it's not that way. And you're seeing a lot of these smaller teams that are popping up that are able to do incredible things with
21:28 the technology that they have access to today and they're doing it for a hell of a lot less money, a hell of a lot faster, and they're also making the players a hell of a lot more happier. And you know, I also just don't think that a lot of these companies even have what it takes anymore to be able to take back what was once theirs or for them to be able to hold on to whatever they have left. You know, I saw a lot of people that have been talking lately about how like Xbox and PlayStation are going back to console exclusivity and things like that and cheering it on like it's 2010. When was the last time either one of those companies sold a game that you would view as a system seller? Something that you would now walk out to go and spend what, $1,000 on a console to be able to buy? I don't think there's a single game either one of them have in their library that'd be worth me doing that. Not for the normal person. I'll
22:14 tell you that right now. A lot of these companies just do not have the juice and somebody else has come in for the squeeze. There you go. There's the good analogy for the video. Anyway, Windrose is a blast. If you guys haven't played it, give it a shot. It's well worth the money. It's only 30 bucks right now in early access. You get a little bit cheaper. That's the benefit of early access. One thing I'm really surprised with though, and I didn't really talk about it in the video, performance in the game is like basically perfect somehow. I don't understand how that works. I got a high power rig, so maybe it's worse for some people, but for the most part, most people say it's been working really well for them. It's a hell of a lot of fun. There's a ton of game to be able to play. You could probably get well over a hundred hours in it just as it is right now, and this is only half the game that we're getting so far. So, go give these devs your support because they're looking to support you. All right. Anyway, thank
23:01 you guys for watching the video. If you guys did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, comment down below. Let me know if you guys have played the game. Let me know what you guys think of the video. Follow me on Twitch. Follow me on Twitter. Also, if you guys might have noticed, there's also some merch for sale down below now. So, you don't not going to bend your arm. You can buy it if you want to. Okay? I'm not going to about as far as the plug's going to go on that to be honest with you. Anyway, stay cool, stay righteous, stay safe. I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace. >> Family. Family. Family.
