Sea of Thieves Developer Addresses Cross-Play Concerns: “We Are Not Removing Cross-Play”

Rare recently made the announcement that they’d be making some modifications to Sea of Thieves’ cross-platform play functionalities, and that to accommodate the upcoming PvP mode The Arena and to ensure that players that participated on a level playing field, they’d be adding in the option for those playing with a controller to only matchmake with other players on a controller. This led to some apprehensions that cross-play was essentially being changed to the effect of having two separate pools of players- but Rare’s studio head Craig Duncan has taken to Twitter to clear up the confusion.

In a series of tweets, Duncan assured players that Rare’s goal is to always “do the right thing by our players and community”, and went on to give a few clarifications. In addition to talking about the timing of the cross-play update, when it’ll be landing, as well as speaking about server density, Duncan assured that cross-play isn’t being removed. Instead, those playing with a controller will only now have an option to opt out of playing with those playing using a keyboard and mouse.

Duncan said that though Rare still expects most players to not take this option, especially in Adventure mode, it’s still an important option to have. Further, he also stated that Sea of Thieves’ player population is “super healthy” on both PC and Xbox One, and that as such, people don’t need to worry about much smaller pools of players for matchmaking while opting out of cross-play. He also said that Rare will be releasing stats to that effect soon.

You can read Duncan’s responses in full below. Sea of Thieves will also be getting a new update in a couple of days that will drastically cut down the game’s file size on all systems- read more about that through here.

Wanted to address a few concerns we see some folks have about our future #SeaOfThieves plans. Rest assured our goals are ALWAYS to do the right thing by our players and community; there broadly seems to be 4 key points that needed clarity:

— Craig Duncan (@Gamerboss) February 3, 2019

2/ The crossplay option is not coming in the February update, see Joe’s last dev update for more info, the team is working now on implementation of the option settings & our goal is to have this in & tested prior to The Arena

— Craig Duncan (@Gamerboss) February 3, 2019

4/ Our player population is super healthy on both PC and Xbox & has been since launch. While we don’t tweet usage data reactively, we will figure out how we share more stats on this soon to give context why players don’t need to worry about our live player or platform populations

— Craig Duncan (@Gamerboss) February 3, 2019