Big piratey thing Sea of Thieves will be getting custom servers as part of a paid subscription service in “early 2026”, developers Rare have announced during a first-ever community direct for the game. That’s far from all of the studio’s plans, with wider shakeups also in the pipeline.
This outlining of plans to make sure the good ship SOT is not only seaworthy, but can successfully broadside the many other vessels competing for its players’ attention comes with some depressing and un-piratey context. It follows Rare being one of the studios affected by Microsoft’s mass layoffs earlier this month, with Everwild being among the number of in-development games cancelled as part of the cuts.
In the hour-ish of their community direct and accompanying Steam blog post, Rare acknowledged that they’ve got some work to do to keep folks invested in the game. “We know we haven’t hit the mark our players were hoping for in terms of game health and performance, especially when it comes to being reactive to cheating and the game experience on PC,” they wrote, “We’re also cognisant that we could be more attuned to the desires and experiences of our player base, and we’ll be working hard to remedy this in future.”
Cue some changes to how the teams working on SOT are structured, with Rare saying it’s expended the team focused on “improving the core playability and stability of the main game”. Alongside this, the studio’s taking a different approach to how they structure three-month seasons, with new stuff arriving every month so the players always have something fresh to do.
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While seasons 17 and 18, both of which were teased here, are coming soon, those custom servers will be arriving early next year. They’ll be deployed as part of a new subscription’s “premium package”, which’ll also include other benefits. You’ll be able to tweak the seas of your custome server to suit your every whim, spawning enemies, turning off enemies, running safer seas fleets, messing about with the devs’ cinematic camera. The place oysters come from is your oyster.
“Although this subscription service is landing next year, we’ve taken the decision to announce it nice and early so that our Partners and creative communities can start making plans sooner rather than later,” Rare wrote, “We want to build this toolset in partnership with the community, and running it as a subscription model means that we can ensure ongoing investment into and development of custom servers as a platform.”
So, there you go. Sea of Thieves is sailing on. Hoist the mainsail.
