Skip to main content

Amazon goes quiet on its Twitch-based Pac-Man game, but Bandai Namco says it’s still in development

Amazon goes quiet on its Twitch-based Pac-Man game, but Bandai Namco says it’s still in development

/

The game is gone from the Amazon Games website

Share this story

A screenshot from Pac-Man Live Studio.
A screenshot from Pac-Man Live Studio.
Image: Amazon Games and Bandai Namco

In May 2020, Amazon announced Pac-Man Live Studio, an interesting new version of Pac-Man that you’d be able to play right inside Twitch. The game was set to release that June — but recently the company removed all traces of it from the Amazon Games website. Nearly a year after Live Studio was supposed to debut, its status remains a mystery — though developer Bandai Namco says the game is still in the works.

Right now, Live Studio’s page on the Amazon Games website shows a 404 error, but the Wayback Machine has an archived version of the filled-out webpage from April 7th. This archived version lists a release date of “coming soon” — many months after the original June launch date. And Wario64, who you might know as one of the best video game deal-finders on Twitter, reported that the site wasn’t working as recently as mid-April.

1/2

There is a live page for the game on Pac-Man’s official website, which says Live Studio is “coming soon” and lists Bandai Namco as the developer and Amazon Games as the publisher.

There’s also a live Twitter account, @PlayPacManLive, that has only posted a handful of tweets. The latest is from August 16th, 2020 (in reply to a tweet from an account that no longer exists) saying that “we’re getting closer to having all the pellets in place.”

After this story was originally published, Bandai Namco shared the following statement, saying that the game isn’t ready just yet:

Amazon is a great partner and helped us with the heavy lifting on Twitch integration, testing and westernization. Pac-Man Live Studio was intended to be part of Pac-Man’s 40th Anniversary celebration, but the game is not quite ready to launch yet. We are working to determine a launch date now, and hope to have news to share soon.

But it’s still not clear why the game is no longer listed on the Amazon Games website.

Amazon’s game development studio has had a rocky history. Hero shooter Crucible launched last May but was put back into closed beta in July and eventually canceled in October. The studio also canceled a Lord of the Rings online roleplaying game in April after a contract dispute with Tencent. (Amazon is still working on its extremely expensive Lord of Rings series, however.)

And open-world MMO New World, Amazon Games’ current marquee title (and, I should add, the only one listed in the Games section of the studio’s website), was delayed for the third time from a spring 2021 release to August 31st in February.

Despite the cancellations, the company recently reiterated support for game development. In response to a damning Bloomberg report from January describing problems at the studio, incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared a memo internally, also reported by Bloomberg, stating the company’s continued commitment to gaming.

“Some businesses take off in the first year, and others take many years,” Jassy reportedly wrote. “Though we haven’t consistently succeeded yet in AGS, I believe we will if we hang in there.”

Update May 18th, 12:13PM ET: Added statement from Bandai Namco and made changes to reflect that the game is apparently still in development.