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Another beta, another extension. After some teething problems last week with Dragon Ball FighterZ, this time it’s Sea of Thieves that’s lengthening its voyage of discovery with two additional days of beta testing.
But while extra testing will undoubtedly benefit developer Rare and the final release, the game is also proving to be a big draw with Twitch viewers as well. It shot into the number one spot on the streaming service on launch, and has often been sitting in 4th place – with 20-40,000 consecutive viewers – dependent on the viewing habits of varied global communities.
The beta was limited to ‘founder’ members on the Xbox Insider programme, and those who had pre-ordered the game, so Rare should have had a fairly good idea of the number of players. But it seemed to be a permissions problem accessing the game, rather than sheer weight of numbers that caused issues. A statement said:
‘Some players who pre-ordered the game digitally are seeing a “too early” message. We have been working with our partners across Xbox to get this resolved as smoothly and as quickly as possible. The fix for the issue began rolling out last night (UK time) and is unfortunately taking longer than anticipated to reach all affected players. We’re sorry that this is the case. We’ve set up a dedicated article for this issue on our Support site.’
With the ability to crossplay the game on both Xbox and PC, plus it being added to Xbox Game Pass for its release, Sea of Thieves is shaping up to be the flagship (sorry) for Microsoft’s gaming strategy going forwards.
The Closed Beta will now end on Wednesday, January 31st at 8am GMT.
