Sea of Thieves crossed a million unique players in 48 hours

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.

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