Updated 5:36 p.m. Pacific with response from Hipster Whale founder Matt Hall.
Y’all like the nostalgia behind chomping pellets and eating ghosts.
Hipster Whale’s Pac-Man 256 (read our review here) earned 5 million mobile downloads in its first week, studio founder Matt Hall tweeted this evening. The Bandai Namco game released August 19 on iOS and Android. It’s a free-to-play app (though you can pay $8 for unlimited credits, essentially buying the game) in the highly competitive $30 billion mobile gaming market, as research firm Newzoo estimates.
https://twitter.com/KlickTock/status/637413317158432768
It took two weeks for Crossy Road, Hipster Whale’s previous hit, to reach that download number, Hall told GamesBeat tonight. That take on “endless Frogger” has reached 100 million downloads since its November 2014 release. Hall said it took two weeks for Crossy Road to hit the 5 million mark, especially since it released on just iOS (it came to Android later).
Hall also said Hipster Whale doesn’t track uninstalls and that “it looks like a lot of people are playing for a long time.”
In an interview with GamesBeat last week, Hall said that the pull of this latest Pac-Man outing would be different from its previous hit, Crossy Road.
“Pac-Man 256 isn’t like Crossy Road,” said Hall. “It won’t appeal to everyone. We made a game that anyone who has played Pac-Man will feel the nostalgia for.”
Five million downloads, however, is a great start in showing that Pac-Man may have Crossy Road’s appeal.
