Blazing Sails: An Indie Game's PR Success Story

A year ago this week, it all kicked off for us. We didn’t know it yet – but we were working on the game that would become Iceberg Interactive’s biggest ever hit on Twitch. Over three thousand broadcasters in dozens of countries have collectively spent more than 16 thousand hours – that’s over two continuous years! – playing Blazing Sails: Pirate Battle Royale.

This has resulted in a staggering number of viewed hours so far: 1.9 Million.

Blazing Sails is a first for me and my team in many respects.

On a personal level, I got to edit my first real game trailer and help organise our first multiplayer booth at PAX East. On a company level, it’s our first Battle Royale game, and our first PvP multiplayer-only game - which for any indie publisher is a serious gamble.

In 2020 alone, more than 600 PvP games were released on Steam – that’s an average of almost two every single day. With online servers to manage and pay for, and so many dominant free-to-play titles on the market – the prospects for a premium indie title to succeed in these waters are grim.

Blazing Sails is the sort of title that huge teams try and fail to create and sustain – so it surprises most when I tell them that this one is a family project, developed by four cousins in Belgium, largely during a global pandemic. It was the unique story of Get Up Games that convinced IGN to feature the title prominently during their coverage of Gamescom 2020 – a move that resulted in our trailer ending up within the over 100,000 views and almost 6,000 engagements on their YouTube channel - their 2nd most engaged with video that weekend from more than 100 uploads.

A lot has been made of the visual similarities between Blazing Sails and Sea of Thieves – Microsoft’s 2017 AAA pirate game. As a marketing team, we knew the comparison was coming, and needed to ensure that players knew just how different our game was to Rare’s under the hood.

That’s why during the Early Access launch in September, I focused heavily on promoting the game with streamers who specialise in Sea of Thieves. Only these players, with hundreds of hours logged in Rare’s game, could accurately and authoritatively explain to an audience just how dissimilar ours was to actually play, and how different our goals actually are.

Unlike Sea of Thieves, Blazing Sails is a fast-paced, multiplayer, PvP game with very arcade sensibilities more akin to arena shooters of yesteryear than a sprawling adventure game. There’s no story or lore, no open world – just pure action.

Captain Falcore has produced a fantastic video on the subject, and was joined by amazing content creators such as burgerwarrior24, CDNThe3rd, PhuzzyBond, the Salt Raiders and many more. With their passionate support, we had a strong release followed by an explosion of streams in November after we promoted the game with a Free Weekend on Steam. We also achieved more than 8 million views on YouTube, thanks to creators like Mr. Fruit, MixiGaming and Elraenn.

Ultimately, Blazing Sails was watched more on Twitch than almost any other title released by a major indie publisher in 2020 (with one very notable exception!), and was one of the biggest new indie releases of the year full stop.

It’s so much more than we expected, and I just want to take the time here to thank all the people who contributed to the success – from our team at Iceberg Interactive, to the developers at Get Up Games and all the writers and video producers who have gone to bat for us.

It means a lot, especially in the year that was 2020, to have something so positive to look back on and feel good about – and in uncertain times, to have something to look forward to in our full launch in 2021!