I’ve seen some quarters of the internet complain about how more and more games are being seemingly made for streamers or YouTube personalities, but Punch Club might be taking things to a new level.
It’s a boxing tycoon simulation where you train fighters to beat up crocodiles, in what sounds like a more interesting twist on the Kairosoft mobile games. It’s coming out on January 25 — unless Twitch Plays beats it first.
The messaging was a little confused at first, with the developers announcing on their trailer that the game wouldn’t be released until Twitch Plays completes a full playthrough. TinyBuild confirmed the release date in a Steam post this morning, but the messaging on their YouTube videos and the Twitch Plays channel at the time of writing hasn’t changed.
The trick with Punch Club appears to lie in the branching story paths. There are different fighting styles you can adopt, different ways of climbing the boxing hierarchy, a tale about your murdered father to uncover, and the other relationships and management quirks that come with these kinds of sims.
I could get into this
It’s an unusual form of marketing, but =people have clearly cottoned onto the marketing power of streaming and the Twitch Plays movement is an incredible beast if you can monetise it. And it helps if your game really suits Twitch Plays as well: there are plenty of opportunities to allow the chat to participate, and there’s no movements required that could slow the channel’s progress.
Twitch Plays is currently 58% through Punch Club, and every time the channel wins a fight a Steam code for the game is dropped into the Twitch chat. You can find out more about Punch Club and its requirements, which include any machine with more than a 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM and a “toaster” for the graphics card, on Steam.
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