Seriously, why don't we have more good pirate games?

The recent success of Windrose, an early access title from small studio Kraken Express, has reinforced a feeling I've felt for a while: why don't we have more good pirate games? Windrose has already skyrocketed to 110,000 concurrent players on Steam, and while it's a great game, it's not a triple-A title blockbuster, but an early access indie that no one had heard of before its Next Fest demo a few months ago. The pirate genre is ripe for exploration, but no one can do it right.

My love for the pirate game genre began decades ago with Sid Meier's Pirates, which I played on my old white-box computer with its big, yellow CRT monitor. The game hasn't aged well, but it's older than some of the staff here at TheGamer, so that's not too surprising. A few studios have tried to recapture the magic of Sid Meier's pirates over the years, but none have come close to the beauty, atmosphere, and gameplay loop of the original pirate strategy masterpiece.

Lots of pirate games, but nothing like Windows

sailing-toward-an-island-in-assassins-creed-4-black-flag-2013.jpg

I also chucked a few hundred hours into Sea of Thieves during Pandemic, as it was the only game my friendship group could play together. I never enjoyed Sea of Thieves very much: everything in that game took ages, and I never knew what I was doing. This is one for true grinders, and a good friend of mine spent over 1,000 hours on Rare's multiplayer Swashbuckler in the 18 months it didn't come out.

It was recently leaked that Assassin's Creed: Black Flag will be getting a remake/remaster in the form of Resync later this year, which is pushing us in the right direction. I've never played the original game, but I've always heard it's one of the better (and more interesting) AC games, so I'll check it out. But other than that? Where are my pirate games? I love to build my ships and sail the seas with my sailors singing sea shanties in the windrose, but this is a game of survival. I like pirate roguelike, pirate RPG, pirate triple-A action-adventure game.

That doesn't mean the developers didn't try to make them. I had high hopes for Atlus, a massively-multiplayer open-world pirate game that seemed to promise a lot, but the game has been languishing in early access for nearly a decade at this point. I'm not even sure if the original development team is still working on it, or anyone else for that matter. Despite this, it has a much smaller diehard audience due to its similarity to Arc of Atlas and the large grind involved. Some people just love that stuff.

Then there are games like World of Sea Battle, a pirate ship MMO launched in late 2025. Again, despite promising much from its open-world and progression, the game has recently received mixed reviews on Steam, most of them condemning its toxic community and poor communication from the development team. The premise is good, but the execution sucks. That's the general approach for most pirate games.

And, of course, there was Skull & Bones, Ubisoft's ill-fated pirate 'open-world naval action RPG' that flopped harder than a scurvy deckhand. I played about 45 minutes of it and immediately took it back: a buggy, barely functional video game that fails to deliver on its core premises with some truly chaotic gameplay options. Despite all this, and Ubisoft's general reputation, people were vaguely still excited about Skull and Bones. People are fond of a good pirate game. No wonder Ubisoft is eager to get the Black Flag remake out, though it's taken a lot longer than I expected.

I never played Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, even though my colleagues loved it, because it seemed like a game where you could do some pirate stuff instead of an actual pirate game.

The market has repeatedly demonstrated that gamers have been looking for a good pirate game for a long time, and it looks like Windows may have just managed to capitalize on it. It's still early days for this survival crafter, as it's still in early access and many games in the genre have shipwrecked here before. But if the developers can continue to add new content and refine the core gameplay loop, this could be the pirate game to seal the deal.