Seems like it would be really uncomfortable to hold beyond a 30 minute play session.
That review has a solid lede:
I watched the 24 minute video of all the games and there are some cool things in there, but this is a disaster waiting to happen IMO. Hopefully they are ready for boutique level sales and interest. If not, this business model is going to crash and burn fast.
I know a fellow who’s working on a game for it (that looks like fun) and didn’t make the first batch. He posts regularly at http://www.retrogameboards.com and I really hope he sees success, but man, this device doesn’t seem to be something exciting to me.
I’d bet they’re hoping the Japanese crowd will take to it (if they can import it there). They love little handheld things and if it becomes a cultural thing, it could take off. Otherwise, I think they’re also hoping maybe it could become the “in” thing for kids at school to have. It’s a gamble, but it looks like they won’t lose money on it overall.
While it was still true merely 10 years ago, that ship has sadly sailed in Japan. It’s so dominated by mobile phones “free” gaming even franchises popular in the West get pretty much ignored in favor of gacha and free to play variations for them. I wouldn’t mind them if their design, by essence, wasn’t for them to never have an ending.
I think the local law that is “limiting” non adults allows them to spend 10.000 yens(~$100) monthly on a single game. We’re talking people with no revenues whatsoever, and I think it gives a perspective of the market that is generated there.
I thought that was the pitch for this thing? That it was meant for an ultra-niche hipster audience looking for quirky “retro” gaming?
I can’t imagine anyone looked at the Playdate’s initial pitch and thought it was going to be a household name.
That’s exactly what this is, they are a Mac/iOS software company who decided it would be fun to try to make some hardware.
“We wanted to do something that felt kind of like a keepsake-y kind of thing, or just like a special thing that came out of nowhere. And the goal was to do something that we hadn’t done before. Not that we’re experts at, you know, what we do now. There’s always room to grow. But just to try to tackle something completely unknown and see what we can learn from it. And so that is why we ended up deciding to do hardware, of all things, for a software company,” says Cabel.
They’ve literally sold out all their inventory for the rest of this year. By all indications it’s an overwhelming success far bigger than Panic ever expected.
I’m really not sure how you’re forming your conclusion here - they’re intentionally selling a device which comes with 24 games as a $180 toy without any model for continued monetization and every being fully transparent that they might never release another season of games. So I assume the cost of development for those games and paying out the developers is fully incorporated into the purchase price alongside the costs of the hardware.
So…anything else they do from here (additional seasons of games, ability to sell individual games, etc.) is just icing on the cake for them.
From all the interviews I’ve listened to with Cabel (the CEO of Panic), he seems ecstatic with the success so far, considering that they had no idea if anyone would want to buy it before preorders went live last year, and the company is well-off enough to take the hit if it did happen to fail.
The fact that they are aiming for boutique level is exactly why Playdate is good! That is precisely what they are going for and precisely what is exciting about it. It’s a weird little toy that doesn’t have to be all things to all people.
A lot of very disappointed venture capitalists out there, shaking their heads and mumbling about “scalability.” Who is thinking about them??
They should release Playdate games that work with their business apps, so I can sit there and crank to make my files upload in Transmit.
I confess I was sort of hoping the crank was how it was powered.
They should release a dynamic podcast app that lets you crank to amp up Cabel Sasser’s maniacal giggle.
I am guessing most Qt3 readers don’t listen to Mac productivity podcasts, so have no idea what you are talking about. :-)
That would be very hard to pull off physics wise in this small of a form factor.
Siracusa on Playdate:
A lot of people here seem to be surprised that people would spend $200 on a niche gaming console when you could instead get an emulation machine or “real” handheld.
To a certain class of person, this makes no sense.
This product is a celebration. It’s all custom hardware, every single part, and they wrote their own operating system. Why would you do that? Why is this not running Linux or a Raspberry Pi or something sensible? Because the company is ridiculous, the people are insane, and this is an amazing thing that should not exist but does.
Call it hipster or whatever, but Panic just seems like a good company which has been low-key successful for decades by just creating good things without over-extending themselves. Then they lucked into mega success with Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game, and decided to use that success to fund something goofy they’re passionate about for fun.
They all seem hyper competent along the way - despite the Playdate’s inherent limitations, everything else they built around it: the SDK, side loading capabilities, Pulp (the web-based game dev tool), their partnerships with well known indie devs, and more just seem like they’ve taken a super thoughtful approach to make this weird passion project as successful as it could possibly be. And so far, they seem to be getting rewarded for that hard work.
Bit surprised it isn’t backlit. The only other hardware miss is no click resistance or anything on the crank, it just spins freely.
Hope some awesome weird games come out for it. Boutique is fine.
Wait… this is the group that made Firewatch the game?!
I got thrown for a loop too when folks were mentioning that. It looks like Panic has gotten involved in game publishing, not necessarily game development