While Sea of Thieves is well known for its adventures on the seas, it has had a secondary competitive mode called Arena. However, that mode had not received any updates in years and has been shut down. Will Arena ever come back to Sea of Thieves? Don’t hold your breath.
While it is not impossible that The Arena will come back to Sea of Thieves at some point, we would say it is highly unlikely to ever happen. According to the blog post talking about Arena’s closure, while it was a tough decision, shutting the mode down was a business choice that made a lot of sense.
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Executive producer Joe Neate noted how only 2% of Sea of Thieves players’ time was spent in Arena, and that the mode never became as popular as was needed to maintain it. Because so few people were playing it, it didn’t make sense to keep putting their efforts into making new content for the mode, and while the main Adventure mode continued to get updates, The Arena was requiring a lot of work to keep it in a playable state. All of these factoids make the decision to shut Arena down pretty understandable.
The Arena is Rare’s first big attempt at a dedicated online competitive mode in any of their games. The blog post noted how the developers learned a lot from the experience, but we would be surprised to see that ever make a return in the current iteration of Sea of Thieves.
