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Sea of Thieves had 4.8 million active players online in June

Kagoshima_Luke

Gold Member
It's currently the 87th most played game on Steamcharts.
austin-powers-ouch.gif
 

iHaunter

Member
Ya, that's why Rare has been releasing a steady steam of content and updates since March of 2018, because it is a failure. That's why Microsoft spent the big bucks for a Disney license and Disney decided to sign on, because Sea of Thieves is a failure. You're so smart. You and Men in Boxes should form an alliance, sloop up, join the Reapers and troll the seas and show all these Sea of Thieves kids what's up.
We're not on speaking terms.
 

iHaunter

Member
Rivet Rivet It would be great if you would like to contribute to the conversation and share your thoughts instead of reacting triggered to any positive Microsoft/Xbox related thread/post and reacting like to any Sony/PlayStation post! :)
People paint me as one as well.

Even though I bought an XSX today. :)

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ManaByte

Member
Well I don't know, I'm surprised the game is so low on Steam with supposedly 4.8 million active players on Xbox. It seems a bit fishy but without proof it's hard to know for sure.

Steam charts don't show people playing on Windows 10 through the Xbox app or on the Xbox.

About the game itself, I watched a few videos, didn't play it, but I think it looks like a nice little game, typically the kind of relatively low budget games you can and should add to a subscription. You need games like this to play with your children. It's great this kind of games is still successful.

Yet that's why all you do is reply with the triggered emoticon.

People paint me as one as well.

Even though I bought an XSX today. :)

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Lies No GIF
 

Roberts

Member
It is clear that some of you want to see this game fail. That’s kind of pathetic.

But here‘s a thing. This game will always have ups and downs when it comes to active players, because only a very dedicated minority plays it all the time. As we all know, it shines as a cooperative experience and it is simply not a game you just launch and play whenever you like. Speaking from a personal experience, I play it occasionally, when me and my friends have our schedules cleared up for this game And sometimes it can take weeks to do that. The most important part is that we keep coming back to it, year after year, because it is an amazing experience. And as long as MS and Rare continue to support it, I will come back to it, especially when they drop new content. Also, I’m pretty sure MS feels that it is successful enough - otherwise they would just let it die.
 

Reallink

Member
What do you actually do in this game? I remember at launch it was derided for having no progession or traditional "gameplay". Just videos of people griefing each other for seemingly no reason (no character progression, nothing was really gained from it afaik). Have they actually fleshed out systems and mechanics, or is it like a big budget Roblox game thats big with kids who like to wander around aimlessly.
 
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Goalus

Member
The metric is "revenue via unit sales":
Holy sh*t,
the Microsoft ensemble consisting of

- Sea of Thieves
- Grounded
- Forza Horizon 4
- Halo MCC
- Flight Simulator

seem to be extraordinarily leggy judging by those Steam charts I linked above.

I fully understand now why Sony fans are desperately gasping for air in this thread.
 
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elliot5

Member
What's do you actually do in this game? I remember at launch it was derided for having no progession or traditional "gameplay". Just videos of people griefing each other for seemingly no reason (no character progression, nothing really gained from it). Have they actually fleshed out systems and mechanics, or is it like a big budget Roblox game thats big with kids who like to wander around aimlessly.
There is still no progression outside of reputation with the emissaries, your own personal knowledge, and the newer season passes (free and paid tiers). It's not like RPG levels.

It's most fun with friends, because the entire game is sailing off on voyages to do some tasks and coming across random encounters, having fun interacting with the mechanics, and having the thrill of running across new players that may be friend or foe. There's plenty of Tall Tales including the POTC stuff which are like story driven quests in a way, with some of the POTC stuff being instanced off so no other players can bother you during your playthrough. There's also more bosses and world events to tackle for higher "end game" content. In the end, you're still doing voyages and turning in loot at an outpost, but it's still fun nonetheless. Again, it is most fun with friends and until you experience the game and it "clicks" then playing Solo will likely not be good.

If you need a game to be an serotonin rush of numbers and flashing particles then its just not that kind of game.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
4.5 million active players 3.5 years after the release.

“Doesn’t have legs”.

Your post doesn't address my singular criticism of Sea of Thieves. I'll reiterate...

Sea of Thieves has effective marketing pushes once in a great while (launch, Steam launch, Disney partnership) but it fails to retain players after it gets a bunch of people to try the game out.

Notice, we're talking about June numbers when the Pirates of the Caribbean update came out in June. I wonder why we're not looking at its May, _____, July, and August numbers...

Dark Souls 3 is more popular on Steam at the moment. That's not a great sign.
 

Chukhopops

Member
Your post doesn't address my singular criticism of Sea of Thieves. I'll reiterate...

Sea of Thieves has effective marketing pushes once in a great while (launch, Steam launch, Disney partnership) but it fails to retain players after it gets a bunch of people to try the game out.

Notice, we're talking about June numbers when the Pirates of the Caribbean update came out in June. I wonder why we're not looking at its May, _____, July, and August numbers...

Dark Souls 3 is more popular on Steam at the moment. That's not a great sign.
Even if all SoT players were on Steam (which is far from being the case), having 12-14k concurrent players three and a half years after the Steam release isn’t exactly bad. It’s doing Fall Guys levels which isn’t even one year old.

I think you’re just digging for negatives.
 
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elliot5

Member
Or he doesn't believe these numbers mean what they people think they mean. And he's right of course.
4.8 million active players in June. It's pretty simple. It's easiest to take it at the lowest requirement which is unique users launching the game at some point. Trying to question if it means that or players with at least X minutes of play is pointless.

It's not that hard to imagine across all Xbox devices and PC after a huge Disney tie in. The game has hit over 20M overall total players during it's lifetime, prior to the announcement. Not terribly hard to imagine June hit 4.8M log ins in a month.

I don't see games like WoW or FF14 get questioned as hard as something like Sea of Thieves. If you don't like the game that's fine, but the need to dissect and concern over statistics that don't matter much is weird
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Even if all SoT players were on Steam (which is far from being the case), having 12-14k concurrent players three and a half years after the Steam release isn’t exactly bad. It’s doing Fall Guys levels which isn’t even one year old.

I think you’re just digging for negatives.

No, because Fall Guys suffers from a similar issue.

It benefits from a great marketing push. IE. It was commercially successful. But it's a poorly designed game (shallow) that everyone knew was going to hemorrhage players weeks after release.

The sign of a quality multiplayer game is when the player base grows despite the lack of a marketing push. Look at Rust. No marketing. Made by a small number of people. Is a janky, ugly mess. Currently the 4th most played game on Steam.

Rare is a massive, well funded studio. The fact that Fall Guys is more popular at the moment isn't a great sign.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Mmm... I don't buy it. Something about this "Active" is directly correlated with GamePass mojumbo. I don't buy it. There's no way there's 4.8m active people playing this game.

What's their criteria?

This game is such a piece of garbage. There's absolutely no way it's 4.8m active.

Has to be fudgery of numbers with GamePass. Like 4.8m "Claimed" this game or something of that sort. Or downloaded, played for 5 seconds, then deleted.

I am quite triggered by their BS.

iHaunter after reading the thread title:
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tmlDan

Member
That's like every game. Sea of Theives is unique in its own way. From being Pirates, to Tall tales to Captain Sparrow. There's 100s of hours worth of content to explore.
the hyperbole in 100's of hours, the map aint even that big tbh and the islands are all small.

but to each their own if people enjoy long hours of sailing for no reason thats cool too.

just not my cup of tea
 

Fredrik

Member
People paint me as one as well.

Even though I bought an XSX today. :)

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This is the way. 👍
I started walking the multi-console path in June, lost some money but gained some sanity.
Make sure to try The Ascent, low metascore but critics has f’ed up big time here, it’s actually a wonderful game and just plain awesome if you like oldschool gameplay with top notch visuals 👌
 

mckmas8808

Banned
4.8 million active players in June. It's pretty simple. It's easiest to take it at the lowest requirement which is unique users launching the game at some point. Trying to question if it means that or players with at least X minutes of play is pointless.

It's not that hard to imagine across all Xbox devices and PC after a huge Disney tie in. The game has hit over 20M overall total players during it's lifetime, prior to the announcement. Not terribly hard to imagine June hit 4.8M log ins in a month.

I don't see games like WoW or FF14 get questioned as hard as something like Sea of Thieves. If you don't like the game that's fine, but the need to dissect and concern over statistics that don't matter much is weird

The bolded is more than likely what this means. People like me question these "stats" literally ALL THE TIME! It's one of my personal beefs with the new age of streaming tech in general. I use it and like it to some degree, but hate that it give all the power to the corporations to create stats out of thin air to use for PR purposes (not saying that it's happening like that here with SoT).

Netflix does it all the time. None of us knows what a stream is worth when it comes to music, TV shows, or movies. Now that same "issue" is coming over to gaming.
 
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Thirty7ven

Banned
Netflix says I watched a movie if I spend two minutes on it.

A gaas game should be judged on how much $ spend in game per user it gets.
 
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It depends how you measure legs. Microsoft can certainly sell the game. Again, it's big updates and marketing pushes are indeed effective to a certain extent. But the player retention drop off is just too drastic for it not to be a part of Sea of Thieves story.

If more people are playing 2016's The Witcher 3 than your big budget multiplayer game in 2021, that's noteworthy.
Almost every game experiences player drop off post a big expansion or event. Thats not uncommon, but SOT is constantly charting on steam, twitch and other platforms. It's a game that by any metric has legs.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Agreed. Sometimes I'd wish the mods were more active with warnings with regards to this.

Counterpoint: Threads are more interesting with respectful disagreement. A Sea of Thieves thread loaded with "Congratulations Rare" responses = boredom.

I'm still rooting for Rare to have a FFXIV Reborn type moment with Sea of Thieves. I'd love to see that happen. But it's not going to happen if people don't understand or address the games faults in keeping players engaged.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Netflix says I watched a movie if I spend two minutes on it.

A gaas game should be judged on how much $ spend in game per user it gets.

Wait what?

A GaaS game should be judged by user retention, if a game has a good gameplay loop and decent content drops people wont NEED to spend money on it and that game should be judged as being good.

I basically never spend money in any GaaS game I play cuz I dont really care about cosmetics if im enjoying the gameplay loop.
Judging a game on how much money is spent will lead to even sharkier monetization techniques than we have now.

Get the fuck outta here!
 
Yes let’s encourage aggressive monetization and pay to win, another genius idea.

What game are you talking about? The Last of Us Multiplayer Pay to Win?

 
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IDappa

Member
Your post doesn't address my singular criticism of Sea of Thieves. I'll reiterate...

Sea of Thieves has effective marketing pushes once in a great while (launch, Steam launch, Disney partnership) but it fails to retain players after it gets a bunch of people to try the game out.

Notice, we're talking about June numbers when the Pirates of the Caribbean update came out in June. I wonder why we're not looking at its May, _____, July, and August numbers...

Dark Souls 3 is more popular on Steam at the moment. That's not a great sign.
Curious do you paint every game in a bad light that announces high numbers around a dlc drop? because every game does it.

Not sure how a 4 year old game having 4 + million player uptick can be twisted into a bad thing but fan boys will fan boy I suppose.
 
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