Pac-Man’s 64-player battle royale game has yet to reach 64 concurrent players on Steam

videogameschronicle.com:

The 64-player Pac-Man battle royale game released earlier this month has still yet to reach 64 concurrent players on Steam.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle was originally a Google Stadia exclusive released in November 2020, but when Stadia officially shut down in January 2023 it naturally ended with it.

Bandai Namco released an updated version, titled Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, on PC and consoles on May 9.

However, according to SteamDB (and as spotted by Daily Pac-Man on X), the game has yet to actually reach 64 concurrent players on Steam.

Since its release three weeks ago, the most people playing the game at any time on Steam was 52, on the day it came out.

For the past two weeks, the player count has almost always been single-figures, with one notable exception on May 22 when it briefly jumped to 36.

These figures don’t necessarily represent a complete disaster on their own – Pac-Man is traditionally considered more of a console franchise and therefore it could be assumed that more people are playing the game on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.

The game also supports cross-play, meaning those Steam players could theoretically still find a 64-player game by joining those playing on other platforms.

While the Steam figures only represent a fraction of the potential player base, however, it does still suggest that the game hasn’t been a smash hit, at least during its first few weeks of release.

The game currently has a Metacritic score of 61 on PS5, and 57 on Switch.

The idea of turning Pac-Man into a battle royale game saw somewhat more success with the release of Pac-Man 99, which was added to Switch Online in April 2021 and allowed up to 99 players to compete against each other.

Just as it was a replacement for the delisted Super Mario Bros 35, however, it too was delisted in October 2023, replaced by F-Zero 99.