Windrose, the Pirate Survival Game, was slowly killing your SSD

It’s fixed now, but Windrose was quietly killing PC SSDs with excessive data writes

The hit pirate game Windrose, which recently reached a peak player count of over 220,000 in Steam Early Access, has been found to be causing excessive data writes on PC players’ SSDs. While the issue has now been patched, the YouTuber Pixel Operative confirmed that the game could write up to 108GB of data per hour. These writes cause wear on a player’s SSD, prematurely ageing the drive.

SSD storage can only handle a limited number of write cycles, making excessive write activity a major problem for software. In the case of Windrose, these data writes were unnecessary, with the game’s April 30th update reducing disk usage during gameplay.

With SSD storage prices rising, it is good that Kraken Express, the game’s developer, addressed this issue before any hardware was damaged. Even under normal circumstances, nobody wants their hardware to fail. But right now, replacing an SSD is a costly endeavour.

So far, Windrose has been hugely successful on Steam. The game has sold over 1.5 million copies as of April 30th. It has also maintained a strong playerbase on Steam, with yesterday’s concurrent player peak exceeding 88,000.

While excessive data writes were a problem, we can gladly say that the issue has already been fixed. Props to Kraken Express for addressing the issue quickly, and long before any SSDs were killed.

You can join the discussion on Windrise’s impact on SSD longevity on the OC3D Forums.