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Over five million pirates have sailed the Sea of Thieves

Over five million pirates have sailed the Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves developer Rare has revealed that over five million sailors have taken to the game's ocean.

A post on the Xbox blog revealed the figure alongside the launch of Cursed Sails, a free update that adds AI-controlled skeleton ships to the game. The update also added a new three-player ship and a three-week limited-time storyline.

“With today’s launch of Cursed Sails, we’re excited to share with you that our community has reached a new milestone of five million pirates that have played Sea of Thieves thus far on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC," said Rare executive producer Joe Neate.

As usual for Microsoft titles as of late, this really tells us very little over how much income Sea of Thieves has generated for the publisher, nor does it reveal a more important figure: concurrent users.

Thanks to Xbox Game Pass, and it’s associated free trial, we can’t tell how many of these players purchased a full-price copy of the game.

With a rapidly growing player base, the question of battle royale in Sea of Thieves has inevitably been posed to Rare. Design director Mike Chapman hasn’t written it off, but would “want to put a unique Sea of Thieves spin on it".


Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.