Punch Club Becomes The First Big Indie Hit Of 2016

Out of everything that’s released in 2016, two titles have stuck out in my mind. The first one is the subversive platformer-puzzler hybrid Pony Island, which certainly stands out for being one of the more meta titles in recent times.

The second is Punch Club, the boxing management simulator whose marketing campaign was run through the quirky medium of Twitch Plays. It’s apparently worked, with the game grossing more than US$1 million in sales in 10 days.

TinyBuild Games, which was also responsible for Speedrunners, announced they had surged past the 100,000 sales mark on all platforms (mobile, PC and Mac) following its release on January 8. The game was scheduled to be released later this month but launched early after Twitch Plays proved to be more efficient than expected.

Punch Club launched on iOS late last week but has already racked up tens of thousands of downloads there, with the Steam Spy database estimating sales on Steam of just over 67,000 as of this morning. The Android version of the game is due out on January 28 (the game’s original release date), while a content patch that expands upon the original storyline is due out next month.

It makes Punch Club the first big indie success of the year — or at least the first big success that we know of so far. It’ll be interesting to see follows suit, and how many other developers think of leveraging the Twitch Plays channel for their own marketing.


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