Sea of Thieves broke its three-month sales target in 24 hours with a little help from Game Pass, and a lot of help from streamers.
In a chat with USGamer, Rare producer Joe Neate explained that while Game Pass (Microsoft's Netflix-style game subscription service) "was part of the success," the team owes a huge amount to streamers and streaming platforms like Mixer and Twitch.
It's an interesting comment, given the general assumption that Sea of Thieves had hit the ground running thanks to the number of Game Pass subscribers that were granted access to the plundering sim from day one.
"I think [Game Pass] was part of the success. We beat all of our sales numbers that we had planned. We had a target to hit by the end of June, which we hit in day one of sales," said Neate.
"But the number one thing that contributed to [our] success was streaming and content creators — like above all else. You could see it almost just in terms of when people were streaming, the number of streamers, the number of people viewing and all that stuff correlated to our playerbase."
A lack of concrete sales figures means it's impossible to know just how well Sea of Thieves has been faring in terms of units sold. Still, we do know the game pulled in 2 million players in its first week, and Microsoft claims the title would've become its "fastest selling new IP" for the Xbox One even without those Game Pass downloads.