Sea of Thieves has just seen a hefty rise in concurrent players on Steam, rising to the highest peak player counts the action-adventure game’s witnessed since its launch on Valve’s platform – and it looks like this could be down to the Steam Winter Sale.
Head to SteamDB and you’ll see the peak player count the pirate game posted around the time of Sea of Thieves’ Steam release in June last year hit a whopping 66,906 (on June 18, a couple of weeks following its launch). Similarly, Steam Charts puts the peak concurrent player count for June 2020 at 66,632. Numbers stayed high for a goodly chunk of July, too, with Sea of Thieves selling a million copies on Steam and having its biggest month ever overall – at that time – as of July 20. However, peak numbers hit each month following this have drifted down to figures somewhere between the 13.2k and 29.2k, according to Steam Charts’ figures.
Now, though, both sites’ records show that for December 2020 Sea of Thieves’ peak concurrents shot up to over 45k, which was hit at the tail-end of December, and its risen further since. Plus, it looks like – as stats tracker site PlayTracker notes – it looks like the Steam Winter Sale is behind the enormous climb.
SteamDB and Steam Charts’ graphs show that SoT’s concurrent player counts started shooting upwards on December 22, the Steam Winter Sale’s start date. The game has climbed steadily since, and the sites’ data now indicates the highest concurrent player peak since around the time the game hit Valve’s store last year has been set during this time – somewhere around 52,916 to 53,347 on January 2, as of writing.
That’s a pretty astonishing climb given the recent peak counts we’ve seen over the past five or so months – it looks like Rare’s high seas romp is going from strength to strength.
Last we heard, Sea of Thieves had sold one million copies on Steam, but that was way back in July 2020. It looks like we can expect that number to have risen a decent chunk since then, given the new peak player counts the multiplayer game’s seen this holiday – especially as SteamDB shows that SoT was in the top three spots of Steam’s global top sellers list the last two weeks.
If you’re keen to pick yourself up something for cheap in the Steam Winter Sale, you’d better be quick about it – the event ends in just a few hours’ time, at 10:00 PST / 13:00 EST / 18:00 GMT (January 5). Or, if you’re on the lookout for some new goodies to try, check out our lists of the best PC games, best RPG games, and best new games available on our home platform.