Sea of Thieves may have already sold 1 million copies on PS5

Sea of Thieves has sold over 1 million copies since it launched on PlayStation 5, sources have told Windows Central's Jez Corden.

2

Microsoft's bet on Sony's platform is paying off in spades. A bit ago, Microsoft made the controversial decision to launch four Xbox exclusives on PlayStation 5, including Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush. Two of these games are live service titles with a premium price tag alongside in-game microtransactions.

While Microsoft has been vague on the performance of these games, and the overall results of its experiment, things are apparently going well. Our own findings here at TweakTown show that Sea of Thieves and Grounded were among the top 25 best-sellers on the PlayStation Store for multple weeks, culminating in an interesting trend of Microsoft having more best-sellers on the PS Store than Sony did (the Fallout TV show also helped catalyze Fallout game sales).

Now we have our first glimmer of numbers from Microsoft's exclusivity-breaking experiment, albeit nothing has been officially announced.

According to Windows Central, Sea of Thieves has sold over 1 million copies on PS5 since launching on April 30. That's nearly 4 months of sales on PS5, with multiple weeks of the game being on the digital PS Store's best-sellers list. We also have to wonder how many millions of dollars have been spent on Sea of Thieves' optional cosmetic microtransactions.

This is a huge milestone for Rare, Xbox, and even PlayStation, who is undoubtedly benefitting from the 30% surcharge commission on all revenues gleaned from Sea of Thieves' sales...so it's curious that no one has mentioned this. Perhaps it's because of the controversy surrounding Xbox bringing its once-exclusive games to PlayStation platforms, but as Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said in February, Xbox wants to 'use other platforms' in order to grow the brand:

"We think this is an interesting point in time for us to use some of what the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises, so we're going to do that," Phil Spencer said at the time, during an official roundtable with other Xbox executives.

And just yesterday, Phil Spencer further elaborated on Xbox's current strategy of releasing more first-party Xbox games on PlayStation, punctuating the announcement that Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is also coming to PS5.

"I look at this--how can we make our games as strong as possible with our platform continuing to grow both on console, on PC, and on cloud. I think it's just going to be a strategy that works for us.

"[...]I think as an industry right now, there's a lot of pressure on the industry. It's been growing for a long time and now people are looking at ways to grow [further].

"I think [...] we just have to anticipate that there's going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed--that's going to change. That's going to change for all of us."