When Rare released Sea of Thieves for Xbox One and PC in 2018, it wasn’t the most well-received title out there. Believe it or not, there were several players and critics who just didn’t like the fact that the game had limited gameplay loop.
Months following its release, however, developer Rare has done all kinds of things within its power to make necessary changes to the game and make it up to those who were initially disappointed with the title. Some of the additions included new missions, objectives, pets, and more. Not only that, Rare even gave its assurance that 2021 will bring even more exciting changes to Sea of Thieves.
Now that the new year has begun, it looks like the new updates scheduled to go live this year will be met with a much bigger audience than initially expected. For the past two weeks, the number of gamers playing Sea of Thieves on Steam has risen significantly. As a matter of fact, this is the highest recorded number of players at the moment since the seafaring title got released on Valve’s digital storefront early last year.
According to the Steam charts, the number of Sea of Thieves players from December 22 until today has leaped from around 10,000 to 50,000. On January 2, 2021, there was a staggering 53,347 players traversing the game’s seas.
Based on our observations, we’ve concluded that the reason for this surge in players has to do with the Steam Winter Sale, which featured incredible discounts for thousands of titles including Sea of Thieves.
It’s highly likely that the sale and its tempting discounted prices was a gateway for many new Sea of Thieves players, allowing even more gamers to experience the open-world multiplayer pirate title and everything it has to offer. We can imagine that those who have been biding their time—waiting for the game’s price to drop—were quick to purchase it during Steam’s annual end-of-the-year sale.
Seeing as Rare promised that 2021 would be a big year for Sea of Thieves, both new and old players definitely have a lot of new and exciting things to look forward to this year.
In other news, the game itself has been through major changes as well. For one thing, Rare announced last month that Sea of Thieves will no longer have regular monthly updates. Instead, the game will turn to seasonal content updates, which is a fairly common update schedule that many video games utilize these days .
Sea of Thieves’ seasonal content update will officially begin this month with a Merchant Alliance Voyage content drop. This event will have players working hand in hand in order to find a shipwreck that has been lost at sea, which naturally contains a myriad of treasure to ravage.
Rare will also be introducing the new “Plunder Pass,” which is the game’s own version of a battle pass or season pass fairly common in popular titles such as Call of Duty and Fortnite.
Steam, in general, has been seeing a noticeable shift in trends recently. While Sea of Thieves is seeing a rapid increase in player base, Cyberpunk 2077 has lost about 79% of its player base since launch.
