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11 Kraken Express is the current name of the independent video game studio that developed Windrose. The studio is headquartered in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, with an office in Hong Kong. It was previously known as Windrose Crew (December 2025 to April 2026) and originally as Crosswind Crew when it announced its first game in March 2025. The team is approximately 60 people plus occasional outsourced work.
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33 The rename to Kraken Express took effect on April 14, 2026, the same day Windrose launched in Steam Early Access. The developers explained the decision simply: "we are renaming our studio from Windrose Crew to Kraken Express. It just sounds cooler, otherwise, that's still us." The studio's team and leadership remained unchanged.
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55 Published Titles
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77 Windrose is the studio's debut game and first Steam release. It is being developed on Unreal Engine 5.
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99 Publishing Arrangement
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1111 At the April 2026 Early Access launch, Kraken Express operates as both developer and self-publisher for most regions, with Pocketpair Publishing acting as the regional publisher in Japan. The previous publisher Forward Gateway no longer appears on the Steam store page. The change is part of the studio's transition from a pre-launch development entity into a fully operational live-game studio.
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1313 Key Personnel
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1515 Philip Molodkovets serves as the studio's producer and primary public spokesperson. He conducted the Gamescom 2025 demo presentation and has given multiple interviews about the game's direction. Molodkovets previously wrote for Game Developer magazine about game design topics, including an article on balancing submarine gameplay in World of Warships (2020). Other identified team members known by handles include Yar_master, Leo, and Jack Vondragon, who have posted on Steam and social channels throughout development. Sean Dagher composed the original soundtrack and sea shanties.
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1717 Development History
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1919 Studio NamePeriodKey EventsCrosswind CrewMarch 2025 - December 2025Announced Crosswind as F2P survival MMO, ran alpha playtest, announced buy-to-play pivotWindrose CrewDecember 2025 - April 2026Rebranded game to Windrose, ran Steam Next Fest demo, hit 1.5M+ wishlists, IGN Fan Fest trailer, Pocketpair Japan dealKraken ExpressApril 14, 2026 - presentLaunched Windrose in Early Access at $29.99; 22,000 concurrent players within 2 hours; Very Positive Steam rating
2020 Community Engagement
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2222 Throughout development and into Early Access, the studio has maintained an active presence on the Steam Community hub, posting devblogs, hotfix notes, and responses to player feedback. The five devblogs published between April and August 2025 were critical for the pivot from MMO to PvE co-op, as community responses during the Crosswind alpha informed major design decisions. A dedicated "Windrose Community Review & Feedback" Steam thread remains the primary channel for community input. The studio has committed to publishing a detailed post-launch roadmap once player feedback from the Early Access launch has been incorporated. The official Discord has grown to roughly 53,000 members.
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2424 Studio Direction
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2626 Producer Philip Molodkovets articulated the studio's philosophy at Gamescom 2025: "We realised during the Alpha test that in terms of amount of work and technical limitations, it would be very risky to keep pursuing this huge scope, so we decided to narrow it down a bit and make one thing right." He has also said it is "better to create a good survival game than a bad MMO game." The Kraken Express team has committed to an Early Access period of 1.5 to 2.5 years, during which the game will grow by roughly 50 percent in content before 1.0.
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2828 Launch Day Performance
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3030 Under the Kraken Express name, the game achieved a strong launch: over 22,000 concurrent Steam players within two hours of release on April 14, 2026, combined with a Very Positive review rating. The launch reception article has details on critical and community response.
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32+Platform Roadmap
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34+At Early Access launch Kraken Express ships Windrose on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store only. A studio spokesperson told GameSpot that the team does not have specific updates about console versions, but is "enthusiastic about eventually coming to consoles" once the full 1.0 PC build is stable. No console platforms, dates, or timelines have been confirmed, and the studio has publicly positioned the 1.0 PC release as the prerequisite milestone before any porting work begins.
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36+Peak Concurrent Players
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38+After the 22,000 concurrent figure recorded within two hours of release, Windrose continued to climb across the launch week. Uzbekistan outlet Kursiv reported a peak daily concurrent count of more than 69,500 players on Steam within the first 24 hours, giving Kraken Express one of the strongest pirate-game openings on the platform. Steam sampled a "Very Positive" user rating on the first ~292 reviews, with players calling out combat feel, visual fidelity, and the core survival-and-sailing loop as highlights.
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40+Studio Influences
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42+In interviews around the Early Access launch, Kraken Express told Automaton that the team's in-house consensus is that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is "the best pirate game of all time," and cited it as a primary inspiration alongside Valheim and Enshrouded for the co-op survival structure. The studio reiterated that the decision to leave free-to-play behind was driven by studio capacity, because sustaining a live free-to-play service is a "tremendously huge process" that a roughly 60-person team could not have handled properly while also building out the world, combat, and naval layers.