With over $1 million in sales mere weeks after release, 1990s inspired boxing tycoon game Punch Club has become this year’s first indie mega hit.

Part of the game’s surprise success can be attributed to its unconventional launch campaign, which required the Twitch community to beat Punch Club together in a “Twitch Plays” event before the game would actually release on Steam.

While the the Twitch Plays campaign was a resounding success, it turned out that the livestream viewers were a little too good at playing the game. Based on internal testing, publisher Tinybuild Games expected Twitch to take roughly one week to beat Punch Club, but the community managed to blast through the game in less than two days, which presented a bit of a problem for the studio.

“Games can’t launch on Steam over the weekend, so if Twitch didn’t manage to beat the game before the Valve offices closed up on Friday afternoon, things could get bad,” developer Mike Rose explained in a post mortem on Polygon. “We started off feeling nervous that they were beating it too quickly, but suddenly we were terrified they wouldn’t beat it quickly enough.”

“Twitch ultimately managed to beat Punch Club in 36 hours, with just an hour to spare before Steam closed up for the weekend. What we didn’t realize on that Friday afternoon was that we’d just accidentally set in motion one of the biggest, most jammy indie game launches in quite some time.”

Twitch and indie games

According to Rose, Tinybuild believes that Twitch is an incredibly important platform for indie developers, and he said that game creators should seriously consider spending the time to include Twitch integration in their projects.

“Regardless of whether you like watching game livestreams, Twitch is by far the largest influencer of which indie games the general populace is playing — even more so than YouTube,” Rose said in his post mortem.

“I’m not just using this one data point to come to this conclusion. TinyBuild has been a Twitch-focused company for the last year now, and it’s safe to say we’ve kinda exploded as a result. While we couldn’t have planned the timing, having Twitch be an important part of our strategy was never in question.”

Screenshot via TwitchPlaysPunchClub | Twitch.tv