Playdate – December 2019 Update | Hacker News Reader

Playdate – December 2019 Update

play.date

75 pointsdonatj20 comments

So basically Panic is a company of polyglots who just work on random interesting things?

Mac OS software, video games, and now a hardware console? Seems like a company I would like to work for. I love learning new things in different fields.

Love it. Not in it to change the world or gain enormous profit, rather in it to make cool shit and have fun. A breath of fresh air.

But our unicorns!

Unrelated to Playdate, but you can change the colors of Panic's sign in downtown Portland by visiting their site: https://sign.panic.com/

Google street view of the sign: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5229525,-122.6819389,3a,25.7...

Firewatch was top-notch. Untitled Goose Game was top-notch. I would never imagine a handheld with a _crank_ actually selling well in 2020; but if anyone can do it, it's Panic.

I am dying for a new type of control. Game input has gotten stale as hell.

Have you seen the Valve Index controllers? https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/index/controllers

Panic is a good example of a tech company that is (I think) not tied to the VC, unicorn wannabe, must dominate an industry or get a huge acquisition rat race most of us work for. They just make good products and make enough money to pay their employees and try new things like this.

They were offered money by Apple back when. In the end they refused. https://www.macintosh.fm/episodes/12

I’m liking the occasional drops of new games (if that’s how it works). Makes for something like a collective community experience similar to the airing of a television limited series. To match, it would be interesting to have a universal leaderboard (perhaps tiered by time-played to shuck the obsessives away from the casuals).

And add ten dollars for a leather case rather than (what appears to be) a padded plastic lid reminiscent of my 75¢ childhood pocket calendar.

> (We’ll also be setting aside a significant number of units for underrepresented developers, and developers who may not be able to afford a Playdate today. More details to follow.)

Would someone who knows more clarify what this means; maybe a Panic employee sees this? Are these for those kids learning to code camps, or some similar sort of affair?

My read is that they want to be inclusive to under-represented developers and people with great ideas that happen to be poor.

Under-represented is very deliberately vague, but often includes both people of color and LBGTQ-identified folks. Oh, and women. ;)

Looks nice, but I can't help but think ... what will happen to the environment if every game publisher starts creating their own console?

Well that’s been going on for 20 years. There’s so many game consoles that have been created they are uncountable.

Nintendo has singlehandedly made more consoles than games :)

They won't, it's expensive and way less profitable than just making a game for one of the big platforms. It also requires a whole different group of people with different skills than a normal publisher has. The only reason to make your own special console is if you have a) a weird niche that you can charge enough to make up for the losses b) have some odd idea you really want to explore (I think this is the main reason Panic is doing this, they had a neat idea for it and figured they had enough of (a) that they could make money doing it) or c) it's going to be cheap and mass market though this still requires a bit of (a).

Embedded hardware isn't difficult with today's SoCs. Manufacturing is easy when using expertise centers in Asia. I expect a write-up on HN of how easy it is to create a similar product before the end of the year, which will cover everything from electronics to injection molding to manufacturing.

If this trend continues we're doomed.

It's getting easier yes but it's still vastly more profitable to just build a game for one of the big consoles or PC and that won't be changing for a long time.

It's 2020, any new hardware project should come with a strong burden of responsibility when it comes to the environmental impact of what you're making. Where are you sourcing the various components used in your product? Are they recycled, or extracted from the earth? How much CO2 is your manufacturing process emitting? Will you take back the hardware from your customers in order to properly recycle it when they don't want it anymore? and so on.

Screwing the environment further to make shiny toys that will be thrown in the garbage a few months/years later is not something we should be doing more of. When it's for something like a medical device, it's one thing. When it's for videogames that can run on any general purpose computer, it's another.

If there's any interesting work in that space, would love to hear about it.

I don't think you're wrong, but there's better avenues to talk about e-waste & general cultural issues behind it and other materialism issues. It's also important to ask these questions in a better manner than shaming/reductionism. For starters, check out Basel Action Network's mailing list (https://www.ban.org - e-waste specific issues at the governance/trade level), and earth regenerators (http://earth-regenerators.mn.co/ - higher level discussion on cultural evolution)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com