Sea of Thieves crossed a million unique players in 48 hours

By Asher Madan
published

Sea of Thieves is rather popular despite its server issues.

Sea of Thieves is finally available on Xbox One and Windows 10, but it's not without its fair share of problems. Aside from performance issues on Xbox One X, players are experiencing problems with matchmaking and other server-related oddities. Today, Rare Studio Head Craig Duncan and Executive Producer Joe Neate took to YouTube to explain the situation. According to the developers, Sea of Thieves is facing an unprecedented influx of players which is significantly impacting the servers.

Duncan said that the game already has over a million unique players in 48 hours and there have been moments where 5,000 new players have joined every minute. He also confirmed that this was "three to four times" as many people as the team saw in the final beta which took place a few weeks ago. While it's great to see that the game is already so popular, hopefully the studio will be able to resolve the issues soon. The video discusses server-side updates as well as an upcoming patch which is expected to hit next early week. It will mostly focus on Xbox One X performance improvements and fix the "vanishing inventory" bug.

Sea of Thieves is an exploration-based pirate game. Rare is known for many famous franchises including Banjo-Kazooie, Conker, and GoldenEye. However, in recent years, the team focused on developing Kinect games for Xbox One and Xbox 360. This was a curious decision, so when Phil Spencer became Head of Xbox in 2014, he assigned Rare a new project. Sea of Thieves is a shift for the developer and a concept the team hasn't tackled before.

The game is currently available at retailers for $59.99 or as part of the monthly $9.99 Xbox Game Pass subscription. Players who purchase an Xbox One X also receive a free copy of Sea of Thieves with their purchase for a limited time.

Keep an eye on WindowsCentral.com/Gaming for all the latest in Xbox and Windows 10 gaming, accessories, news, and reviews!

Asher Madan
Asher Madan

Asher Madan handles gaming news for Windows Central. Before joining Windows Central in 2017, Asher worked for a number of different gaming outlets. He has a background in medical science and is passionate about all forms of entertainment, cooking, and antiquing.

22 Comments
  • Does anyone remember the player numbers from gta v on the release date
  • Uh, not equivalent.  GTA V launched as a stand alone game.  A more apt comparison would be GTA:Online, and that's not comparable either due to the fact their netcode sucked and couldn't facilitate the load for months after launch.  Also, they had an install base when Online was released. PUBG would be a better comparison, but since that started as a crowdfunded game, it had cultivated a following long before launch.
  • They sold $800million worth copies within 48 hours
  • Wait what? How did you come up with that? LOL
  • Not at all. I'd wager a lot are using Game Pass.
  • Hard to tell but if it's the case, it's a testament to the success of Games as a Service, and the dawn of a new era. Netflix of games, anyone?
  • I suppose so but it's also the best-selling game on numerous outlets even though Far Cry 5 is right around the corner. It's hard to make that deduction until Microsoft or NPD reveals more information.
  • In any case, people playing and showing this much interested in the game already makes it a hit.
  • I'm hoping Microsoft supports it for a good few years with lots of updates. It's amazing but needs more enemies and merchant factions. I also thought they would at least add the ghost ships in the launch build but I guess that's also for the future.
  • That really depends on what is an hit.
    It can be a combination of many things.
    Critical success, being popular within the gaming community or good sales and revenue.
    There is game pass trial or game pass deals that will let players try the game. Also it's 1m unique players meaning that one copie of a game can be played by multiple people. If we want to see about it being a commercial success they really need to communicate numbers that matters. 1) how many did it sell and 2) the number of game pass members every month.
  • I`m playing via Game Pass, probably buy it when the bugs are squashed
  • I have it, but i cant play till this weekend! Cant wait
  • 1 more day!!!
  • I'm about to get onboard too, so chalk that up.
  • It sucks to have to put up with server issues but kudos to the Rare team for creating a very cool game
  • The server problems seem to be fine now. I haven't had problems the whole day with voice communication or matchmaking.
  • I didn't have any server problems today, I might have been lucky.
  • Nope, they fixed them. Today, Thursday, is also a really good day. No problems for me so far. I'm just waiting on my Ebony Pistol to land so my outfit is perfect.
  • I only had server problems the first night. Since then, I've been loving it. My favorite game of 2017-18.
  • The server issues were "intentional", in a way that RARE blocked new players from entering the game during 2 or 3 hours, to solve issues some players were having. Who didn't log out, continued to play without any problems.
  • Lucky, I had to wait a few hours for that to be resolved.
  • Don't really want to rain on the parade here but I'm already tired of delivering chickens and going from outpost a to island b to outpost c with a chest. Thats literally everything you do in this game, mindlessly grinding the same quests. Sure, they're amazing fun the first few days but then you log in and it starts being a drag, just doing the same 3 things over and over and over and over with zero real progression and inflated prices on the cosmetic items, which by the way is all you can buy.