6M Players Later, Sea of Stars Ships Its Final Update

"It tells the story of the tragedy they went through, and sets the stage for the adventure to come." That's how Sabotage Studio describes the centrepiece of Sea of Stars' final update: a brand-new cinematic intro that puts faces on heroes previously known only by name. The Sunset Edition is available now as a free update across every platform the game exists on, and it doubles as the studio's farewell to a game that took seven years to build and reached over six million players worldwide.

Sabotage Creative Director Thierry Boulanger laid it all out in a studio update video, confirming that Sunset Edition is the last content update Sea of Stars will ever receive. Beyond the cinematic opening, the patch expands a key flashback sequence later in the game with new sprite-based storytelling, rebalances both Normal and Hard difficulty modes, and introduces new key art by Bryce Kho. The difficulty rework is more specific than a simple numbers pass; Sabotage split the Tactician's Mettle relic into two separate relics (Tactician's Mettle and Ray of Sunset), which should make the standard experience feel tougher. If you already finished the game, you can see the new intro just by starting a fresh save.

Six million players for a retro-inspired turn-based RPG from an indie studio is a staggering number, and it didn't happen by accident. Sea of Stars won Best Indie at The Game Awards 2023, and Sabotage followed up with Throes of the Watchmaker in 2025, a free expansion that added over eight hours of content, a new playable character, new classes, and couch co-op for up to three players. All of it free. I keep coming back to that detail because it runs so completely against the grain of how most studios treat post-launch content. No season pass, no paid expansion, no battle pass drip-feed. Sabotage just kept giving stuff away.

What Comes Next

With Sea of Stars wrapped, Sabotage has fully transitioned to its third game, currently codenamed Project Sparrow. According to the studio, the project has been in development for over a year and has officially entered full production. No details beyond the codename have been shared.

The Switch 2 version also went live alongside the Sunset Edition. It's a standalone port rather than a traditional upgrade path, but Switch 1 owners can claim it for free via a permanent 100 percent discount on the eShop. Save files from the original Switch version can be imported, though you'll need to have downloaded both the game and your saves to the new console first. The game is also now available on GOG for the first time.

A physical collector's edition in collaboration with iam8bit is still on the way, expected to ship later this year. Sea of Stars first launched on August 29, 2023 across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam, with iOS and Android versions following on April 7, 2026. It exists in the same universe as Sabotage's debut game, The Messenger, and with Sunset Edition now live, the studio's run of free post-launch support across both titles stands as one of the best examples of how to treat players in an era where most studios would have charged for half of it.