Sea of Thieves is a beautiful, joyful, pulse-quickening, sweet tech demo. The team obviously spent enormous effort, skill, and time in getting the water and the wind and the sailing just exactly right—and they are marvelous! Unfortunately, after years of development, they have little game to go with them. And the game industry has seen too many games live too long in development. This is a real problem, because a game that stays in development too long dies. A novel too long in development risks being over-written, but the tech doesn’t move past it. A novel in the works for ten years may risk feeling old school, or thrillers may seem ripped from yesterday’s headlines, but most genres are insulated from the dangers of time. A game in development for a decade, however…

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