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
Rank | Game |
|---|---|
1 | Counter-Strike 2 |
2 | Windrose |
3 | Pragmata |
4 | Mouse: P.I. For Hire |
5 | PUBG: Battlegrounds |
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.
Game | Highest concurrent players (as of Apr 19) | Launch price |
|---|---|---|
Mouse: P.I. For Hire | 13,755 | $29.99 |
Pragmata | 68,689 | $59.99 |
Windrose | 222,134 | $26.99 |
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
Before Fate | April 14
Here's a "time-traveling survival adventure" with a pleasantly ornate art style evoking indie comic books. It's all about leaping through time portals into different worlds, exploring them, finding weirdos in them, extracting resources from them, and bearing witness to an unfolding story about a research institute on the hunt for "the secrets of the universe".
Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts | April 17
If you saw the art in Pentiment and thought, I'd like to mess around with that, here is a game that lets you do that. It's a cosy game about illustrating a medieval manuscript from a vast array of preset art. There's a story mode about taking on commissions from "prestigious patrons" but the freeranging sandbox mode looks like it could keep you busy for dozens of hours.
Worthy or Not | April 18
Asian FMV dating sims continue to hit Steam with almost alarming regularity, but this Chinese offering seems to be doing much better than other recent entries. It follows the travails of a "matchmaking agency owner" who must conduct "verbal duels" with, well, usually young women. It's not the only FMV romance on Steam this week: Beta Kafe: Write Your Love Story also released.
ZPF | April 17
This horizonal shmup was originally designed for Sega Mega Drive / Genesis. And no, not back in the '90s: now. You can buy a cart for the old Sega consoles here, but assuming you don't want to do that it's also available on Steam. Anyone keen on chunky 16-bit sci-fi psychedelia is going to want to check this out.
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