Following its initial reveal at E3 2015, fans have been eager to sail the open waters of Microsoft's exclusive open world game, Sea of Thieves. Not only does this mark Rare's big return to game development, the game intends on letting players live out their pirate fantasies of sailing, treasure hunting, and battling other players encountered on the open water. So far, the experiment appears to be a major success, even with a handful of flaws. While Rare continues to improve the overall experience, Microsoft announced a few recent achievements the open world pirate game has managed to unlock.

Microsoft announced on its blog that Sea of Thieves has quickly gone on to become the best-selling Microsoft Studios first-party title on Windows 10 and the fastest-selling first-party new IP of this generation. After launching to a million players on March 20, the game has continued to grow, now hosting over 2 million players. On the social side, Sea of Thieves has also been watched for over 10 million hours since it launched, with 100,000 people streaming the game in total as well. This community effort has also pushed the game to the top of Twitch and Mixer multiple times.

Sea of Thieves Character Customization

The post goes on to reveal that Rare is actively listening to the community in terms of fixing issues caused due to the high demand as well as future updates. Just yesterday, a new update came out to resolve an issue preventing Xbox game Pass users from playing the game in addition to other fixes. Even though Rare isn't planning on releasing a post-launch roadmap like some companies do, the developer is planning on releasing news regarding what the team is working on and how it plans to continue to evolve the Sea of Thieves experience.

While this news is undoubtedly a big win for Microsoft and Rare, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Sea of Thieves. Unfortunately for many players, widespread server issues have not only prevented many from accessing the game in the first 24 hours but forced Rare to disable some features such as achievements to improve the experience in the short term. In addition, many players continue to question the amount of content that the full game contains, a problem that originally arose from the community during the beta tests. It's a question that Rare will likely have to address soon in order to retain the high player count the game has seen since launch.

Sea of Thieves is available now on PC and Xbox One.

Source: Microsoft