Following rumors that some Xbox games would be making their debuts on new platforms, Xbox confirmed the plan: Four games (for now) are dropping their Xbox console exclusivity in favor of new launches on PS5 and/or Switch. This includes Obsidian’s Pentiment and Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush, and, biggest of all, Sea of Thieves.
The live-service pirate sandbox has been an Xbox mainstay since it kicked off the Game Pass day-and-date launch scheme in 2018. The news was met with different opinions. Some Xbox diehards saw it as an unexpected maneuver in a decades-long console war and felt Xbox was ceding territory to the enemy. But within Rare and the Sea of Thieves community, the developers say it’s all smooth sailing. GameSpot recently caught up with Sea of Thieves creative director Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate to discuss how Sea of Thieves launching on PS5 is exciting for the team as it will infuse the game with new tales of adventure and the pirates who live to tell them.
“I think it’s interesting to see how the Sea of Thieves core community is taking this news,” Chapman said of the game’s upcoming PS5 launch. “They get it. Sea of Thieves is a community. The game, at its heart, is about multiple player motivations coming together in a shared world. You can be the adventurer that does Tall Tales. You can be the fisherman who just catches and cooks fish. You can be the pirate who wants to go engage in ship battles […] So the chance to expand that community with a new range of players that get Sea of Thieves as it is today, with even more richness and even more motivations to follow, I think the community sees it in the way that’s only going to make Sea of Thieves more vibrant […] I think the thing that we are most proud of is that Sea of Thieves still stands completely apart as a unique gameplay experience. There’s nothing like it on Xbox. And I think it’s fair to say there’s nothing like it on PlayStation.”
