Sea of Thieves Still Has “Millions of Players”, Says Rare; Plans To Continue Supporting It

Rare has announced a brand new IP in Everwild, and it has stated its intention to continue working on new IP, rather than rest on its existing laurels. But what does that mean for a game like Sea of Thieves? There was always the core of a great game within it, but it’s really come into its own over the last few months. Is this the moment Rare decides to move on from that game, though? Because that would be spectacularly bad timing.

The good news is, there is no such move away from Sea of Thieves planned. Speaking to Eurogamer, Studio Head Craig Duncan said that players continue to love the game, and the developers continue to have a lot of ideas and passion for it, so they plan to continue supporting it.

“[We] still have a super successful ongoing service-based IP in Sea of Thieves that still has millions of people playing it. We love the community. We love the feedback we get,” Duncan said.

“We feel really good about the monthly updates. We’re actually having a stronger year two [in Sea of Thieves] than we did year one. We don’t really talk about numbers too much. But I think our December this year will be stronger than our December last year. And we’re well into year two of Sea of Thieves now. Our anniversary not only brought new people into Sea of Thieves, but [was] a huge reengagement moment.

”Generally what we see is, when we introduce new events and content and monthly updates, we see people come into the game as new players, and we see people come into the game that have played – maybe they played at launch or anniversary and they’ve stopped playing for a few months – and they come back, and some of that’s through Xbox Game Pass, some of that’s through people recommending it to their friends, some of that’s through people seeing the game being streamed, and then going and buying it. So we feel really healthy about Sea of Thieves. We haven’t run out of creative ideas to put into it and the team is still really passionate about Sea of Thieves.”

It’s good to hear Rare plans to continue supporting Sea of Thieves, since as I said, the game has now finally come into its own. I imagine that this also seems to indicate the possibility of a Scarlett port, though given that that console will be fully backward compatible with the existing Xbox One and all of its games, maybe that won’t be as much of a necessity as it once would have been.