On April 14th, an awesome pirate game called Windrose dropped on Steam.

No massive marketing push — a lot of people reporting on it now are saying it came out of nowhere. There was certainly no carefully coordinated media narrative. Windrose is just a game that knows exactly what it is, who it’s for, and is delivering on that promise.

And (surprise) people showed up. The internet at large can’t seem to stop talking about and praising this game.

Not because they were told to. Not because it was “culturally important”. But because they wanted to play it.

That alone puts it in direct opposition to a growing chunk of the modern games industry — and mainstream media as a whole.

Because if you look at something like Mixtape, another recently-released game, you start to see the split.

On paper, Mixtape should be a modern media darling. It’s “indie.” It’s critically adored. It checks the right boxes, hits the right notes, and has all the aesthetic markers of something that should have loads of “cultural impact”.

And yet, talk to the few people who actually played it — or just read through unfiltered audience reactions — and the response is cold at best, openly hostile at worst.

That disconnect isn’t random. It’s the point.

What Windrose Gets Right (and we can all learn from it)

Windrose works for a few important reasons.

First, it leans unapologetically into its identity. Pirate fantasy, mechanical simplicity where it matters, and a clear understanding of what its players are there for. It doesn’t dilute its core to chase a broader demographic, and it openly avoids what trend-chasing AAA studios all think they need to be doing. (Microtransactions, live service, etc.) They did this after listening to their early access player base and…gasp…giving them what they asked for.

Perhaps most importantly, Windrose feels like it was made by people who actually like the kind of game they’re making.

That sounds obvious, but it’s increasingly rare these days to see mainstream creators in any sector who care more about their audience than their own egos.

Perhaps the greatest move Windrose made was avoiding the culture war. There’s no sense of obligation baked into this game. No feeling that the game is trying to lecture you, fix you, or reshape the medium around you. It’s entertainment-first, and everything else is downstream of that.

Players can feel that immediately. And when they do, they respond — because the relationship is intact. A creator makes something for an audience. The audience shows up. Feedback loop closes.

Simple. Almost suspiciously so.

Indie Isn’t a Budget Anymore — It’s an Attitude

It’s easy to think of “indie” as a financial category. For authors, it just means we haven’t signed with a tradpub house. For games, it means a small team, minimal budget, and no publisher. (And so on…)

That definition is basically useless now because mainstream is co-opting the term for their own marketing.

Mixtape is technically indie. So are a lot of games backed by significant capital, polished through layers of production, and pushed through the same marketing pipelines as AAA releases — just with a different coat of paint.

That’s not independence. That’s branding.

Real indie, at this point, is about alignment.

• Are you building for an audience that actually exists?

• Do you respect that audience?

• Do you actually care about your medium and your work beyond what virtue signaling you can get out of it?

• Are you trying to make something people want, or something you want people to want?

Windrose answers those questions cleanly.

Mixtape… doesn’t.

The Mixtape Problem

The easiest way to describe Mixtape is this: it feels like a game that was approved, not demanded.

It exists because it made sense to someone inside the system. It fits a model. It checks boxes. It signals the right things to the right people.

But who was waiting for it?

That’s the question that keeps coming up, and it never gets a clear answer other than “with less than 100 concurrent players, nobody lol”.

But why then can a game that almost no one bought or even finds compelling get a shower of critical praise? Why did it even get made?

This mystery isn’t new, but it’s getting harder to ignore.

You end up with two parallel realities:

• In one, Mixtape is a success.

• In the other, it’s something players bounce off of almost immediately.

And those realities barely interact anymore.

When Creators Stop Liking Their Audience

Game developer Leigh Alexander is a great example of horrible creators being pushed to the top of their fields and handed loads of money…

With a Twitter feed of openly sexist and downright hateful rants about gamers (her supposed audience) and male creators, she was tasked with making another game that recently bombed: Aphelion.

Again, no one asked for this game or its messaging. And no one is buying it. But, as we now expect, critics rushed to hang awards all over it.

It’s impossible to ignore the connection between the journalists, awards committees, and the mainstream media at this point. It’s the reason we see novels that are borderline unreadable and barely science fiction winning Nebulas and Hugos. It’s why movies and games and streaming shows win awards in the face of their own failures.

Mainstream media is a snake eating its own tail. All of these effects are proof of my theory that mainstream no longer exists for us at all. It doesn’t care about making a dime because these projects are funded by people so wealthy that throwing away $150m on an ideological passion project doesn’t faze them. These projects don’t have to make money because they’re a tax write-off or a way to check boxes on an ESG scorecard.

When the product is meant to be “all message” and nothing else, you end up replacing real talent with activists and identities. You need only look at the rosters of big studios (game or film) or a list of recent award-winning novelists to see the proof.

Not only does this lead to a woeful lack of actual skill and creativity to apply to these projects, it puts all the wrong people into their creative processes. You end up with a talentless, angry homunculus that sees its own audience as a problem to be solved, not like-minded people to entertain or inspire.

And once that mindset sets in, the work changes.

They stop asking, “What would people enjoy?”

They start asking, “What would advance my own agenda?” and then cower behind politics when no one wants the output.

This is how we end up with movies, books, and games that are technically competent, critically praised, and functionally dead on arrival.

Entertainment for no one. That’s what mainstream is giving us.

Why Critics Don’t Matter Like They Used To

Critics used to be the bridge between creators and audiences.

Now they’re often speaking a different language entirely.

That’s not a moral failure — it’s structural. They’re evaluating media based on criteria that don’t always map to the audience experience. In the best of cases, you can feel them making excuses for the latest big budget flop, or trying to justify the very existence of terrible media by assigning it any number of “culture points” that they pull out of their asses.

They’ve made themselves irrelevant, and the world is starting to notice.

Discovery has already moved elsewhere. Communities, streamers, word-of-mouth. Direct contact between creators and players.

The middle layer — journalists, critics, and awards committees — is still there. For now.

Why This Keeps Happening

The gap between Windrose and Mixtape isn’t a fluke.

It’s the result of two different feedback loops.

One loop is tight:

• Make something people want

• Watch how they respond

• Adjust

• Grow

The other is abstract:

• Secure funding

• Meet internal goals

• Receive critical validation

• Repeat

Only one of those loops requires an audience.

Guess which one is more resilient.

The Real Shift

What Windrose proves isn’t that every small game will succeed.

It proves that the old excuses don’t work anymore.

You don’t need massive backing. You don’t need institutional approval. You don’t need to reshape your work into something “important.”

You need to make something people actually want — and mean it. Sometimes that means actively listening to them. At the minimum, it means respecting that audience.

That’s it.

And that’s why I know that what we call indie right now — across all media — is going to rise to the top and displace legacy media. Hollywood will be replaced by more creative, more agile studios. Traditional publishing will be replaced by genuinely creative, talented authors who respect their readers. AAA studios will be replaced by indie developers.

The consumer trends are all shifting that direction as we speak. One of the only barriers to a complete inversion is that legacy media controls the supply chain — but even that is changing. That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time and money developing Indieguana, because all we need to see a complete inversion in publishing is for tradpub to lose their grip on distribution. (And they already have a pretty tenious grip right now.)

I’ve been saying for years that readers just need a better place to find indie authors, and they will start flocking to them. I kept waiting for someone to figure out what that place looked like, and eventually decided I might as well build it myself.

Sure, it’s going to be a long, uphill climb…but I’m invested in any idea that helps the millions of us that are the real audience and the real creators climb over the entrenched elites to forge their own paths.