Update: Bandai Namco has shared the following statement with The Verge, 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.
Amazon announced about Pac-Man studio in May 2020 which is an interesting and new version of Pac-Man, that allows playing this game inside the Twitch platform. Earlier it was proposed that the game had to be launched in June but recently the company removed all about this game from the Amazon Game website. After about a year, when Live Studio is supposed to be debuted, its status is still a mysterious thing.
What’s happening to the Twitch-based Pac-Man game?
As first reported by The Verge, a 404 error is shown on Live Studio’s page on Amazon Games Website for now. From April 7th, the Wayback Machine has an archived version of the filled-out webpage. Interestingly this archived version lists a release date denoted as “coming soon”, and this is also after many months of the original June which is the launch date. One of the best video game deals- finder on Twitter named Wario64, has stated that the site was not working as of now in mid-April.
Pac-Man’s official website contains a live page for the game containing information about this, stating that Live Studio is “coming soon” and tells Bandai Namco as the developer and Amazon Games as the publisher.
@PlayPacManLive, a live Twitter account has posted some tweets and the recent one is from August 16th, 2020 (which is in reply to a tweet that is no longer available for now) stating that “we are getting closer every time to having all the pellets in place “.
Unknown silence by Pac-Man game developers
For knowing the status of the game Amazon stated that it forwarded the inquiry about the game to Bandai Namco, which has not responded yet.
Amazon-backed game failure is one of the major issues and Pac-Man Live Studio is yet another example of this problem. Last May, a game named Hero shooter Crucible launched but after some time it was put into closed beta and eventually then canceled in October. This studio after having a contract dispute with Tencent, also canceled Lord of the Rings that is an online role-playing game in April (Despite this, Amazon is still working on its very expensive “Lord of rings” series.)
If Pac-Man Live Studio never comes, then it also shows that Amazon is lacking in its potential goals of offering playable games on the Twitch platform. It was supposed that Live Studio not only allows you to play the classic Pac-Man mazes that are known to you but also set to offer co-up with up to 4 players and thus let you make and share your mazes.
No doubt about this fact that pandemic is the biggest reason for delaying many games but it is not certain what is happening in this case because both Amazon and Bandai Namco have been silent and respond nothing about queries.
Many Amazon Games have been canceled but recently the company repeated support for game development. CEO Andy Jassy shared a memo but internally (in response to the damning Bloomberg report from January detailed the problems at the studio), telling that company will continue its commitment to gaming.
Jassy added that “Some businesses take off in the first year, and others would take many to take off, as we are not consistently succeeded yet in AGS, I believe we will do it if we hung in there “