Xbox’s move to bring some games to PlayStation is already finding early success. Sea of Thieves is currently in Closed Beta for folks who pre-ordered the game. And the servers are already buckling under the pressure. The game’s developers, Rare, jumped on social media and said the beta is “currently experiencing a high volume of new players, which may result in longer waiting times than normal.”
There also appears to be an issue with getting players connected to all the regional data centers the dev team uses for Sea of Thieves. From Rare:
“While the team are hard at work attempting to mitigate the issues as we speak, we will not be able to resolve the issue fully during the Closed Beta.”
This issue can cause two problems. Long matchmaking times and higher latency as players connect to servers that aren’t the closest to them.
For folks who do manage to play this weekend, any progress made will carry over once the game officially launches on April 30. Sea of Thieves’ newest season, Season 12, will kick off the same day with new weapons and content coming.
Sea of Thieves is part of Xbox’s expanded plan to bring more games to rival platforms. Four games are coming (or have already been released) on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5:
- Pentiment – released February 22 on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch
- Hi-Fi Rush – released February 22 on PlayStation 5
- Grounded – releasing April 16 on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5
- Sea of Thieves – releasing April 30 on PlayStation 5
These aren’t the first games to hit other platforms. When Minecraft became part of Xbox, support continued across all platforms. And with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard, games like Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Diablo will continue to be released on other platforms.
But the four games above do mark a shift as Xbox looks to expand each game’s community and how much they can make. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Xbox expand even further, depending on how well these games are received.