Join the Sea of Thieves Weekly Stream!

From the outset, one of the key ideas for Sea of Thieves was to create a game that was as much fun to watch as it was to play. We've kept this in mind from the dialogue we used for the game's announcement all the way through to our appearances at events and the trailers we've created.

This was never more conspicuous than in the E3 2016 Gameplay Trailer. It was a huge moment for the studio and we knew that we wanted to show off the game using real members of our community and their genuine reactions, all in a picture-in-picture style that anyone familiar with streaming would instantly recognise. It also gave us the opportunity to showcase players' real emotions and expressions – we wanted to demonstrate how the game made people feel rather than just provide a bullet point list of mechanics.

This wasn't a new area to us. We'd been capturing this sort of footage since the very first playable prototype demo with Head of Xbox Phil Spencer way back in October 2014, and this approach of splicing together player stories from different perspectives had always felt like the way we wanted to show Sea of Thieves to the world when the time came.

Thankfully, the trailer got a huge swell of support from the content creator community, who saw this format as validation from Xbox and Rare of a commitment to Sea of Thieves as a game with their format of artistic expression at its heart.

Fast forward to the launch window and we saw a massive surge in video content from all platforms as we rose to the top of Mixer and Twitch whenever creators were able to get their hands on the game. We saw players fully embracing their inner pirates, and amazing emergent scenarios unfolding to hundreds of thousands of viewers across the globe.

Now, six months in and with 90 million viewing hours to date, we wanted to get in on the regular live streaming action, as frankly we were feeling a little left out! And so was born the Sea of Thieves Weekly Stream.

Much like our pre-recorded video content and the game itself, our Weekly Stream will grow around the kind of content our community is looking for. While these streams are intended to showcase the game rather than act as formal Q&A sessions, initially we do feel it's a good idea to have a Sea of Thieves developer on board who can answer burning questions from the chat if necessary and let viewers see how well (or decidedly averagely) they play the game themselves.

We always want to include our community as much as possible and we have some exciting plans in mind, but we also want to use these streams as an opportunity to highlight and support some of the amazing talent already out there. As such, each stream will feature at least one content creator from our community.

Then of course there's the game itself. We want to base each stream loosely around a challenge, whether it involves showcasing some of the latest content or coming up with fun and engaging trials using existing mechanics.

The most exciting thing is that this is only the beginning and we look forward to evolving with our fantastic community. We stream on Mixer, Twitch and YouTube, then the streams are archived for anyone who wasn't able to catch the live broadcast. Our first three streams can be found embedded in this article, and these along with all future archived streams can be found on the Sea of Thieves YouTube page.

We look forward to seeing you every Tuesday from 5pm-7pm BST!

– Jon McFarlane, Community Video Manager