Sea of Thieves hits Steam, and its top-sellers list

Sea of Thieves is having a modestly successful jump to Steam, two years after its original launch

Rare’s take on pirate games, Sea of Thieves, is now available on Steam. The game’s been available since its launch in 2018 on PC via the Windows Store, but now you can enjoy piracy on a platform that’s less prone to nightmarish breakdowns. The launch hasn’t been a record-breaker in the early goings, but it seems there’s a solid base of players waiting to try out Sea of Thieves.

Sea of Thieves is currently at the top of the ‘top selling’ list on Steam – most new releases of any notability get there – and has a slowly rising concurrent player count, currently peaked at 10,867, as SteamDB shows. That compares favorably to other Xbox-branded multiplayer games on Steam, like Gears 5 – which hit an all-time player peak of 10,196 players at launch.

The difference is that Gears 5 launched on day one alongside its other versions – Sea of Thieves hits Steam over two years after its other counterparts. (Though given the player counts the Halo re-releases have drawn in, maybe people just want old games more.) Sea of Thieves still uses Xbox Live for account services, even through Steam, so you get full cross-play with users on both Xbox One and the Windows Store.

Microsoft’s never provided concurrent player count details similar to those we get from Steam, but we know the Sea of Thieves has logged over 10 million players in total since launch, so the Steam counts are not nearly the full number of players at any given time.

Microsoft’s gaming division has become increasingly open to launching first-party titles on Valve’s platform – recent releases from Gears 5 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection to Ori and the Will of the Wisps have hit Steam alongside their Windows Store counterparts.