Rusty Williams, Flying Lab Software CEO, has publised a devlog detailing the current state of Pirates of the Burning Sea, where he covers topics ranging from shipping and distribution, to putting the finishing polish on the game.

It's been a while since I've started a thread, so I thought it'd be a good time to catch everybody up on where we are.

First, the game itself. Now that we've essentially finished coding the new features, we've been able to spend more time on bug fixing, performance, and polish. For example, the majority of the developers have been focusing on server improvements. ConCo has finally had the chance to replace the rank 1-15 missions (yay!!!) and will be spending their time polishing up the encounter logic and the rest of the missions. Most exciting are the big new additions: Avatar combat and boarding combat. All of the new avatar combat missions are going in, as well as the boarding combat support. Our designers have been duking it out with one another with big boarding battles, and it looks like a lot of fun. We're iterating very quickly on it, with daily status mails, real time bug fixing, and lots of attention. And the rest of the team is finally getting a chance to go back and just polish their work, and fill in placeholders.

What's also helping us move so quickly is that we've also grown again. We're up to 68 people. One of those people is a full time web developer, who's in charge of implementing and rolling out our new web site. This has been a long time in coming, and it's finally at hand. It'll do a much better job of introducing a new visitor to the game, and also provide some fun resources, especially the new ship guide! It'll take a little while to put up, and I expect Aether will have some update on its progress as we crank through it.

Another one of our new hires runs a full time usability/playability lab, where we bring in players to see what they think of the game. We're also conducting tests of our new marketing materials, the new web site, etc. As you might expect, this kind of data is extraordinarily useful in fine tuning the game, and it's extremely cool to watch our test scores constantly improving. The lab is on the second floor, which we've now completely moved into. We don't anticipate leaving our current space until after we ship the game.

Read the full atricle here.

On the PotBS forums, in the thread discussing this article, there is a lot of discussion about SOE getting involved with the billing and distribution of the game.  Not sure if that is something they are working on, or just speculation.