Sea Of Thieves Studio Rare Confirms Plans For Subscription-Funded Custom Servers In 2026
Rare has revealed its future plans for Sea of Thieves in a dedicated broadcast overnight, revealing one of the main features coming in 2026 is the addition of subscription-funded custom servers.
Due out early next year, paid servers will give Sea of Thieves users access to a number of exclusive tools including a cinematic camera that is used to make trailers. No details on the monthly membership fee have been announced yet. Furthermore, Season 17 onwards will see a shakeup for Seas of Thieves designed around a new three-month model, the first of which will focus on revamping the game’s sandbox.
Moving on, the second month of a new season will grow the game’s live events, while the final month is billed as a ‘call to action’ in order to entice players back for a major world event. Rare also revealed that Season 18 will update the Devil’s Roar area and continue the story of the Dark Ancients.
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Speaking during the broadcast, Drew Stevens, Production Director on Sea of Thieves, commented:
We’ve felt like we’re always on the back foot. With a lot of areas, we felt we’re a little bit slow to react. We don’t have the necessary resource or team structure to allow us to jump straight back and to start to address some of those things that we’re seeing, whether it’s around quality control and shipping features at a place that we’re just not quite happy with, to game performance, like slowly being in a place where we’re adding new features to the game but performance over time is degrading, through to game security. I feel like we were too slow to react as cheating started to build in the PC community, and there’s a couple of areas around that — even just long-standing bugs, and our ability to go and address that stuff alongside features.
Sea of Thieves launched in April 2024 for the PS5 as one of the first Xbox-exclusives to make the transition to rival formats.
Sea of Thieves was originally released for the Xbox One and PC back in 2018, and sees players taking on the role of a pirate — selected as a procedurally generated avatar — before embarking on the high seas. Here, you’ll take on quest for trading companies, netting you treasure in the process, which is used to sold to representatives at outposts to swell your reputation. The game is set in a shared world, so you’ll bump into other players, engaging in naval battles and attempting to pinch each others’ treasure in the process.
[Source – IGN]
