Rare has enlightened the whole public with a new perspective on the existing and upcoming content in Sea of Thieves. Namely, the developers believe that the benefits are only for the gamers playing their product, thus decided that every forthcoming content in Sea of Thieves will be for free.
Rare has confirmed this in a recent interview for gamesindustry.biz, The Design director over at Rare, Mike Chapman, has somewhat revealed their plans for Sea of Thieves. In the confirmation, it clearly states that Rare doesn’t have any ideas for charging consumers for future content. Therefore it’s common to believe that each continuous expansion will be entirely for free.
As Chapman stated:
[With monetisation] we won’t step on the shoes of the gameplay, we won’t segregate our players, we certainly never would do pay-to-win.
In its continuation, he also defined the reason for the free content:
We will never charge for those content releases because that would segregate our players. We took decisions around never having power progression in the game – you might have it within a session if someone finds a gunpowder keg or other weapons in the world – because otherwise, you’d reach the stage where certain people couldn’t play together. You’d have this weird thing of having to keep up with your friends, maybe feeling like you were being left behind. That will never happen in Sea of Thieves. So the idea of having to buy an expansion in order to play with your friends – we’d never do that.
However, that leaves Sea of Thieves without any chance of monetization (as currently is) such as many other video games nowadays. In that department, Chapman has stated:
We have no plans locked in place now on when we’d add monetization. The one thing I will say is if we do that, we won’t just take something from another game and put it into Sea of Thieves. The way we’ve looked at mechanics, tried to innovate and do things differently, we’d want to do that with monetization as well. It’s not just about taking another approach and forcing it into Sea of Thieves. With all of our mechanics, it has to feel at home.
Sea of Thieves had a rough start. In the beginning, the game built its hype especially during the Beta, for which it all fell into waters after its release. The content offered during the Beta has typically remained the same after release, which further frustrated the players. After that, it was all the repetitive content because of the simple quest system, until Rare has started to take additional actions.
We also truly believe that adding a Battle Royale mode in Sea of Thieves would be a nice addition since it’s the most popular genre nowadays. That clearly implies the intentions of it, as so as the power of gathering more people in video games.