Microsoft has announced that Sea of Thieves has more than two million players, and is already the best-selling Microsoft Studios first-party title on Windows 10. Furthermore, Microsoft revealed that more than 100,000 players have streamed Sea of Thieves since launch.
In addition, more than half of a million new Xbox Live friendships have been forged to date and over 400,000 players have joined an Xbox Club to find pirates to share stories with.
Yesterday, Rare released the first major update for Sea of Thieves that improves performance, fixes a range of potential game crashes, and makes some changes/adjustments to a number of features.
It will be interesting to see whether Rare will add more content to the game, especially after some harsh criticism about the lack of meaningful content in Sea of Thieves.
For what it’s worth, the game runs and looks great on the PC platform as you can read in our PC Performance Analysis article.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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These are all PC sales?
No, it is the best-selling Microsoft first-party game on Windows 10 alongside having over 2 million players in total.
PC is win 10..
2 million player total (including free game pass and other things) on both xbone and win10, best selling Win10 game. could be 50k or 100k, who knows ?
Microsoft’s claim that this crap has outsold other Microsoft Studios first-party games on Win 10 Store is perhaps revealing in itself.
More specifically, Forza Horizon 3 (quite possibly the top-selling Win 10 Store game) was by Playground Games which is a privately owned business not owned by Microsoft (they’re officially classed as a ‘second-party partner’) so that game wouldn’t fall within the scope of Microsoft’s boast.
EDIT:
Also, with Mojang being a first-party Microsoft Studios dev’ then Microsoft’s boastful claim would consequently indicate that not many PC owners have bought Minecraft from the Win 10 Store. They’ve presumably bought it, i.e. the Java edition, direct from Mojang’s website for Minecraft whereby doing so also supplies them with the Win 10 edition.
In summary, this is why Microsoft’s boast is so disingenuous because it relies on people’s ignorance for it to sound as though it’s a grand achievement. A little digging to substantiate the facts shows Microsoft’s boast to be much less impressive of an achievement.
The exact same thing can be said for Rare…
Incorrect. Rare is a first-party Microsoft Studios dev’ studio so therefore the exact same thing evidently cannot be said of them.
MS owns a commanding share 51% of Rare and Rare still owns their intellectual properties. Forza is an MS IP and is actually more 1st party than Sea of Thieves which is and still will be owned by Rare if MS ever loses their commanding share. Unlike titles 1st party IPs such as Gears of War, Halo and Forza.
Indeed. It nevertheless doesn’t change the fact that Rare is a first-party Microsoft Studios entity and Playground Games is not. Hence for why your original claim is factually incorrect.
I personally would say they would refer to this as a 1st party title as well. Playground worked with turn10 to develop the game and we can agree to disagree here.
Bub, we may not get along but you’re right this is very telling of how many people are purchasing games off the Windows Store.
If this thing has outsold Forza Horizon 3, and even the Age Of Empires Definitive Edition(Which should be their most sold game but it’s apparently got problems) there is a problem and they’re never going to be like a Steam in terms of games being sold.
I’ve had Windows 10 pretty much since it came out and I learned you could turn off all the bullshit people were freaking out about rather easily, the store has never worked for me and that’s the one thing I kept on just encase they released something worth playing like another Freelancer, or some other old school Microsoft Studios product.
Hi. It’s certainly true to say we’ve not gotten along too well thus far but I’m willing to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start if you are. Life is too short for such bitterness, after all.
I’ve expanded on my thoughts about Win 10 Store in consequence of Microsoft’s boastful statement in my reply to somebody else who responded to my initial well received post.
Yep, in common with yourself, I’ve had Win 10 for some time now and have overall been content with it. I ‘get’ for why some people hate on it but there’s always been a vocal contingent who’ve hated on every new version of Windows from as far back as Win 95 so it has to seen in context, imo. When I’ve gone back to Win 7 on my other seldom used PC it now feels somewhat clunky in comparison.
IT would be truly hilarious if they released numbers and it sold at the most 10k copies and it truly is just a bunch of console players who got ripped off again. Time and time again those players don’t tend to think beyond a sense of instant gratification of “This game is fun!” but only in that moment. Ten days from now, what’s it going to be? 100k people playing the game at most? Less than that?
Who knows, but we all know one thing now sense Streaming has come out and has brought alongside the wonderful gift of knowing what’s in a product. This game is flat, and will die off fast due to the lack of content.
Good riddance, play taps, and possibly purchase Blackwake since it’s actually trying to have content and is appropriately priced for the amount of content in it.
Dont forget, 2 million players doesn’t mean 2 million sales. I, and many other people, paid 1.99 for 2 months of gamepass and cancelled auto-renew.
LOL, no way this game has sold 2 million on PC, also the game can be played on gamepass and you can play it for free by doing a certain thing.
LOL
Do you have any proof of that claim?
Played the game post patch. Didn’t seem to fix anything.
It seems pretty light in content , I am waiting for it to be 15$ or adds much much more.
It seems me laddy’s have jumped onboard the ship to quick and she’s sinking already because of the lack of content. Nothing to pirate here but skull and bones.
i doubt 0.01% are from windows users.
Most Xbox Play Anywhere games like Forza Horizon 3 or Gears of War 4 sells 90-95% copies on Xbox. Boss of Coalition said that only 5% of Gears 4 gamers are from PC
Precisely. Hardly any PC gamers give a damn about Microsoft Studios and the UWP games they’re desperately trying to sell without much success on Win 10 Store.
About the only IP they hold that’d be of potential major interest would be Halo but that tired franchise long ago jumped the shark following Bungie having freed itself of Microsoft.
I have not seen any news about the sales of these games or the studio chief saying that. What is the source?
Glad I am not part of this group. Everyone I know who did buy it got their refunds.
If the content is not there on day one – or near it – then it is going to be a greed controlled, price gouged drip feed and milked like Destiny. I did have hope for this game, but a content patch would have to hold what I was lead to believe would be present in the game (like a pirate themed Skyrim attempt).
Those several years of misleading E3 and gaming site marketing promos really got us and it all just makes us even more skeptical of what we are pitched.
The best thing about this game’s release is witnessing the hilarity of the Xbots having gone in to full-on damage control mode. ?
“Sad” or otherwise, Microsoft’s boasting is by implication rather revealing.
As I commented below, Forza Horizon 3 (quite possibly the top-selling Win 10 Store game) was by Playground Games which is a privately owned business not owned by Microsoft (they’re officially classed as a ‘second-party partner’) so that game wouldn’t fall within the scope of Microsoft’s boast.
Also, with Mojang being a first-party Microsoft Studios dev’ then Microsoft’s boastful claim would consequently indicate that not many PC owners have bought Minecraft from the Win 10 Store, i.e. the ‘Minecraft for Windows 10’ edition. They’ve presumably bought it, i.e. the normal/Java edition, direct from Mojang’s website for Minecraft whereby doing so also supplies them with the Win 10 edition.
So there’ll likely be many more people playing Minecraft on Win 10 than there are playing Sea of Thieves on Win 10 but because they didn’t buy it directly from the Win 10 Store then Microsoft can get away on a technicality with making their boastful but ultimately empty claim.
Microsoft’s claim, by implication, could well indicate that Gears of War 4 and Forza Motorsport 7 didn’t sell very well at all on the Win 10 Store. That’s something many of us already suspected so Microsoft have now inadvertently all but confirmed it.
In summary, this is why Microsoft’s boast is so disingenuous because it relies on people’s ignorance for it to sound as though it’s a grand achievement. A little digging to substantiate the facts shows Microsoft’s boast to be much less impressive of an achievement.
Microsoft’s desperation to big-up Sea of Thieves with some fatuous and highly disingenuous PR spin has ultimately backfired due to it having served to provide greater insight to how poorly Win 10 Store has been performing for them as a commercial entity on PC.
I guess they’re adding more content laters? Hopefully not paid.
Feels sorry for those 2m
It’s also the fastest dying Microsoft first-party game on Windows 10.
Ubisoft’s For Honor finally has itself a challenger on PC in that respect!
2M Rubes in the same category as those who bought No Mans Sky. I’m not sure which is worse. But like other people said, I highly doubt it’s 2m actual copies since you can play the game on game-pass.
They’re going to realize quickly they messed up buying it. I honestly feel sorry for them. I don’t know if Rare is going to add content, but if they do, and I’m talking a lot of content, like a full games worth of content; maybe then it will be worth it with a massive price drop to 20 bucks.
Misleading advertisement of this type of should have been made illegal after NMS, somehow it’s not since consumer protection is basically in the “who the hell cares” category of gaming right now and always has been.
Common, thanks for the video! Looks like I can try it out for free.
All’s good then. ?
Not much I can add to our debate re: Win 10 as we’ve now covered all I’d have said. Perhaps my only gripe with it being that Microsoft allows those who have the Pro version (or whatever the more business-oriented one is called) to supposedly 100% disable Microsoft from monitoring usage whereas we can’t do that with the normal version. That doesn’t sit well with me at all purely on principle. Just because our smartphones may be monitored that way isn’t, in my opinion, ample justification for why our PCs must now be that way too.
Glad you said that in response to my comment of Win 7 now feeling clunky in comparison because my experience isn’t an apples to apples comparison because my old Win 7 PC obviously has less powerful components and its OS is on a hybrid HDD whereas my Win 10 PC has more modern and more capable components plus its OS is on a blazingly fast 2x NVMe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0.
Precisely. My suspicion is that, as if often the case, the common perception is distorted by the vocal minority posting on the internet. In other words, the vast silent majority of people are fine with Win 10.
Actual sale numbers ? it can be the #1 in UK for weeks with only 5k.
The content in this game is.. *puts on glasses* incredibly Rare! *screaming starts*