Rare seems to have themselves dropped a teaser for Sea of Thieves going multiplatform.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the official Sea of Thieves Twitter account dropped a poem of sorts:
“Rowboats are red, And sometimes they’re blue, Other times they’re green, Occasionally they can be white… Wait, where were we going with this?”
Obviously, the allusions to colors are code for video game platforms. Red is for Nintendo, blue is for Sony, and green is for Xbox. These are the colors the three companies use for their logos and branding, and they are prominent in their marketing and promotions.
We aren’t quite as clear what white alludes to. Some people seem to believe this is a reference to PC, specifically Epic Games Store, but both Steam and Epic use black and white in their iconography and design language.
It’s certainly a surprising turn of affairs, as rumors of Microsoft deciding to make more of their first party games multiplatform had spread like wildfire over the past week. Microsoft is set to explain their future plans in an episode of the Xbox podcast tomorrow.
So, the expectations fans had was that Microsoft would not be spurring any rumors on until after they made an official announcement. Apparently Rare was ready to put their name on the line.
Sea of Thieves released all the way back in 2018. In fact, it is one of the first Xbox published games that was released on Game Pass. As of this writing, the game is playable on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam. The title is free-to-play, but the advantage of playing it on Game Pass is you can play on the same save across Xbox consoles and PC, using the Xbox app.
The game is proof of concept that Microsoft can launch successful live service games on their platform, and on their dime. Rare also achieved a remarkable feat, as Sea of Thieves is designed to foster creativity and cooperation in an online multiplayer title.
To put it quite plainly, Sea of Thieves is the perfect game to make multiplatform. Not only does it have less stringent system requirements as a last generation game, it’s the kind of game that encourages players to be friendly with each other, an advantage if you’re looking to bridge a community across different platforms.
So it really wouldn’t be a huge surprise when the news finally becomes official, but that doesn’t make this any less exciting. If this title is definitely going multiplatform, than it’s likely Hi-Fi Rush is doing so as well. And we may learn about other titles that will get this treatment, though we don’t quite know what those other games are yet.
