Xbox is “really pleased” with Sea of Thieves on PS5
Earlier this year, Microsoft launched four Xbox exclusives — Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves — and Pentiment, on rival platforms. Shortly after its release on PS5, Sea of Thieves dominated the PlayStation charts, becoming the best-selling digital PS5 game in Europe for May. Now, in a wide-ranging interview with Variety that touched on several topics, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty has discussed Sea of Thieves on PlayStation and how it’s impacted the game on Xbox.
“We’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen on Sea of Thieves,” Booty said. “In terms of some things that I can share that were encouraging to us is that when we launched Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5, we saw an uptick in engagement on Xbox and PC. There’s this thing where you’ve got more people coming into the franchise, which causes more excitement, which actually grows the franchise overall, which, if you want to be really direct about it from a business point of view, allows us to continue to reinvest in that franchise and continue to grow it.”
Booty then revealed that about half of the Sea of Thieves players on PlayStation were playing with other people on different platforms. “This is about expanding that community,” Booty said. “It’s one of the things that’s core to our Xbox promise about letting people play where they want to play, with the people they want to play with, on the devices they play with, and it’s encouraging that we didn’t see sort of a vertically insulated community there. The work the team had put into being best-in-class in terms of cross-platform play really paid off because we saw people engaging outside of their own device ecosystem, which was great. The other thing is it brought new players into Sea of Thieves. One of the real goals that all of our franchises have, and one that we all have across the industry right now, is ‘How do we grow?’ and it was really great to see that it was bringing in new players that had never played Sea of Thieves before. I think we consider that a success.”
Touching on Microsoft’s Xbox exclusive strategy, Booty reiterated that decisions about bringing exclusive games to other platforms will be made on a case-by-case basis and that Microsoft is “committed” to having “launch exclusives” on Xbox.
“We will continue to make those decisions individually on a case-by-case basis,” Booty said. “We are absolutely committed to having launch exclusives on Xbox. It’s part of our core promise, and we want to continue to bring our games to more players on more devices going forward. We certainly have got a lot of experience with that with things that have just historically been multiplatform for so long.”
Shortly after the Xbox Games Showcase, Xbox boss Phil Spencer also spoke about bringing Xbox games to more platforms. According to recent reports, Hellblade 2, Age of Mythology: Retold, and Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition are supposedly being considered for release on other platforms. Another rumor suggests a Halo: Combat Evolved remaster could be on the cards for a PS5 launch.