To say that many are still reeling from the “massacre” that Xbox and Microsoft set forth not too long ago is an understatement. Many people lost their jobs in the name of “ensuring the company’s future,” and multiple games and studios were shut down, “trimmed down,” or something in between. Even the companies that have been doing well overall, like Rare, had some lost workers, and that left many wondering about what would happen to Sea Of Thieves. The game has been chugging along without an issue for some time, but with Rare losing people, can they keep it up and sustain the game’s player base while also adding new content?
All the answers to this were done via a special live stream that you can see below. The Rare team didn’t mince words and said that while Sea Of Thieves will continue, and hopefully continue for the next five years, they would be struggling with certain elements due to the lack of people. Here are the words of production director Drew Stevens about the entire situation and how it relates to how the team has always felt about keeping the game alive:
“We’ve felt like we’re always on the back foot. With a lot of areas, we felt we’re a little bit slow to react. We don’t have the necessary resource or team structure to allow us to jump straight back and to start to address some of those things that we’re seeing, whether it’s around quality control and shipping features at a place that we’re just not quite happy with, to game performance, like slowly being in a place where we’re adding new features to the game but performance over time is degrading, through to game security.”
The game’s creative director spoke on the team doing its best going forward to continue driving content to what it needs to be, while also ensuring that fans get what they want in terms of fixes. To that end, the upcoming content drops will maintain the three-month model that has been around for a bit. The hope is that these longer content drops will help sustain the game until the next content drop is ready.
Ironically, they didn’t mention the layoffs at all in the overarching sense, likely because of a directive from Microsoft. Even still, you have to wonder if they’ll be able to pull off everything they want to do, including whether they’ll be able to make the Custom Servers they want to release soon work. Only time will tell.
