Sea of Thieves is an upcoming exploration-based pirate game from Rare. The developer is known for many famous franchises including Banjo-Kazooie, Conker, and GoldenEye. However, in recent years, the team has focused on developing Kinect games for Xbox One and Xbox 360. This was regarded as by many in the gaming industry as a disappointment because the talent was being wasted on a peripheral with an uncertain future. Years later, with the Kinect out of the picture, the developer finally got a chance to showcase its creativity in new ways. When Phil Spencer became Head of Xbox in 2014, he assigned the team a new project. Sea of Thieves is a shift for the developer and a concept the studio hasn't tackled before.
Recently, a closed beta for Sea of Thieves took place and it quickly became the most popular game on services like Mixer and Twitch. The closed beta offered a small slice of the entire game so that Rare could test out matchmaking and other basic features. However, we didn't know the exact statistics for the test until now. An image from Rare's offices made its way to ResetEra which detailed everything from player count to concurrent streamers. According to the website, the photograph was captured by a Twitter user who toured the building after the beta ended.
Some of the highlights are listed below.
- More than two million in-game hours played.
- 314,021 total players.
- 35,882 peak concurrent players.
- 402,488 quests completed.
- 14,260,440 hours watched.
- 104,204 average viewers.
- 269,000 concurrent views on Twitch.
- 871,180,805 gold earned.
- 132,969 players sailed the sea alone in a ship.
- 121,748 players were part of a two-person crew.
- 160,797 players were part of the standard four-person crew.
- 30,595 content creators.
From this data, it seems as though the Sea of Thieves closed beta was quite popular. While the player count isn't as high as what we usually see for such tests, the viewership definitely is. If Rare delivers on its promise with the final version, hopefully the increased visibility on game streaming platforms will bring in more players.
Sea of Thieves has been delayed a few times but we finally have a concrete release date. As announced at The Game Awards 2017, the game is now scheduled to launch on March 20, 2018, across Xbox One and Windows 10. The game will also support Xbox Play Anywhere and native 4K resolution on Xbox One X.
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