Since Rare's pirate-em-up Sea of Thieves launched back in March, it's been hard to gauge how well the game has been performing but thanks to an interview with GamesIndustry.biz we have some idea.

In a piece with design director Mike Chapman, the site says that each user has played - on average - 22 hours 43 minutes, with the total play time coming in at 91.4m. 1.5m Xbox Live friendships have been made while playing the game.

That's certainly better than the vague player figures we have had for the game so far - Rare and publisher Microsoft boasted two million players in the game's first week, a number that has risen to five million since. The issue, of course, being that the game was available as part of the Big M's Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

Some key figures are missing, however. We have no idea how many daily or monthly active users the game has - which are arguably the most important numbers to a service-based game like this.

Chapman does admit that there was a drop-off in players after launch but insists enough people are playing the game to make it worth Rare's while.

"Because there's this incredible amount of mechanical freedom, it's inherently watchable," he said.

"A lot of big streamers came into the game [at launch], bringing their audience with them. A lot of those streamers typically play PvP games, so you had a lot of behaviour on the servers that was more combat-focused, very one-dimensional, almost playing it like Counter-Strike. Those guys play a lot of games so they moved on, and Sea of Thieves stabilised to a really healthy core where people are doing a variety of things.

"Traditionally, you see a huge spike at the start and then a managed decline until there's nothing. The idea was to keep this community engaged, so there's always something to go and earn, and these regular content releases. As long as players are loving the game - which they are - and as long as they keep coming back, we'll keep making content."