The Playdate store is now open
shop.play.date
shop.play.date
I've been on the aspiring developer's mailing list for years. /sigh.
Super bummed that this means missing out on enjoying season one "live".
As it stands I'm not going to order until the unit is in stock. I'm so burned out on the chip shortages.
The Malaysian relationship is thanks to TE though, but that relationship can't make Magic happen
Hit a 502 bad gateway page, which disappeared after refreshing 3 or 5 times.
Put a playdate & cover into my cart, joined the queue -- which let me in to pay a bit under two minutes in.
Tried to check out, was told they didn't ship to Australia: Already knew that was wrong, because their FAQ said they did.
Refreshed, couldn't check out. Refreshed, couldn't check out. Tried the Apple Pay option that appeared for the first time on my third attempt, got "Try Again!"
Eventually, after removing the cover and frantically smashing refresh a few more times, I got my order through for the "late 2021 batch".
Not exactly a lovely experience, but it feels like Panic did what they could.
ping me at jared@smell.flowers and we can figure out logistics
I’m (weirdly?) dreaming of trying to port/make “utility” apps for the device, like some form of web browser and VoIP phone. Or a small offline 1 bit map? (Crank to zoom in/out)? :)
Better error messages could’ve saved me a lot of frustration!
even Retroids cheapest pocket at $70 crushes this hipster garbage. what is the appeal of playdate?
Nowhere does Playdate indicate it is anything but single player or that it currently has any games, but im sure 'some famous people' doing stuff is cool too.
Yes! I could buy many assortments of things for the cost of a Playdate but I want a Playdate. It sounds interesting to me in a way that 2 retroids or 200 packs of gum doesn't.
> some famous people' doing stuff is cool too.
Yes! I find it interesting and a project I'm interested in supporting even if it ends up being disappointing.
> The Season.
> Here's the truly unique bit. Playdate isn't just an empty system. Once you set up your Playdate, you'll start to receive two brand new games... every week. For 12 weeks.
Having novelty doesn't make it garbage, and yes, paying for 24 new games to get made is generally more expensive than pirating Dreamcast ROMs.
FYI: NONE of the games listed on their season page have a release date.
That's a release date, even if a slightly amorphous one keyed off of a specific event that we don't know the exact timing for yet.
Modern consoles are so powerful that an indie dev is rarely limited in what they can do, which might sound like a good thing, but there's a reason Orson Welles once said, "the enemy of art is the absence of limits".
Think of it like a film maker spending more money to use old film/lenses. Yeah, using the phone in their pocket and windows movie maker would be cheaper and higher quality, but that's not the point.
I am also very curious what MP experiences will be possible with the WiFi/BT on a retro handheld.
Panic is also building an SDK and visual editor, and the games are included and time-released, so there’s a lot of software to fund too.
I genuinely don't get it to this day. I can understand clothing because it's a status symbol and a very visible one usually. I can understand a collectible because its a physical object that atleast looks interesting.
An NFT (to me) is a fundamentally flawed concept because it's trying to introduce the concept of ownership into a space that doesn't work like the physical world.
Maybe I'm just overthinking and it's yet another money laundering scheme that has some media hype around it.
...but, seriously, the selling point is the experience plus some fairly nice fit-and-finish. They're advertising it hard on the inclusion of a season of interesting games from notable developers in the price.
Certainly, you could pirate a whole lot of ROMs and play them on that retroid device, but that's a different appeal.
[0]: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...
This is every bit as pretentious as it seems, and literally requires a high price attached to it for it's target market...
But that's ok! It's no different than a ton of other fields that thrive on a certain level of ironic pricing.
It's no different than paying $500 for foam slippers that retailed for $75 that claim to be designed as affordable footwear for the masses and intentionally look as weird as physically possible(Foam Runner)
Or spending $200 dollars on a literal clay brick: https://stockx.com/supreme-clay-brick-red.
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This is like the tech version of a Supreme collab. People are even geeking out over Panic being involved in the comments here.
Ironically a lot of the people I can picture buying this also look down on that type of thing, but it's all coming from the same roots.
But the meat of the issue isn't related to ultimate success, it's that the famous Slashdot comment, and the grandparent here, aren't getting the point -- they're caught up in a feature list comparison, and missing the holistic element. The iPod was worse than a Nomad in the metrics people were using to compare MP3 players at the time; it was just also a better product.
Of course, telling the difference between a refined product and a pretentious flash in the pan is famously difficult. But that's the theory of why you'd buy the Playdate instead of the Retroid.
(My personal take is that it looks fun, and it wouldn't take many of those first 24 included games being decent to get it to a respectable value.)
I think it will go exactly as this person imagines. They just don't realize that, while not a success in most contexts, the level of sales and appeal this will have define a success in this specific niche
I think you’re completely right and it‘s funny reading the justifications for the price and the hype. I mean, kudos to Panic for their success with the Playdate, but I have a justified reason to believe that a lot of these devices will end up in drawers after the novelty factor has worn of.
And even if it does, it's immoral to do so.
I feel like I mainly see people interested in this who I'd consider casual gamers at most but who are into deep design (UI/UX/ID/Typography).
Definitely not my thing though, and I don't get why anybody in the world is interested in a handheld like this when we have the Switch, tons of retro and Windows-handhelds, and above all the Steam Deck being released soon-ish.
Retroids plays decades old games and the owner has to scrounge around and find the roms illegally (as it is incredibly unlikely they have the means to rip their own).
here's a one sheet FAQ etc https://play.date/mediakit/
I always assumed "reflective" is "bad" when it comes to screens, and contrast in variable lighting conditions - it would reflect too much of background, other lights, etc. Best screens for variety of lighting conditions (as opposed to dark room) seem to be matte.
Any thoughts / anything I'm missing?
'Transflective' means that display has both backlight and reflective layer (Pebble used such technology). Playdate has no backlight, only reflective layer so it is 'reflective', not 'transflective'.
None of the games on play date will be as good as the pack in Tetris game on gameboy but the price doesn’t seem that bad when put into context.
When the Game Boy launched the nearest competitors were either technically better but far more expensive like the Lynx, Game Gear and Turbo Express or cheap terrible things like Tiger LCD handhelds. If the Game Gear was half the price would the Game Boy been as well received?
Yes the Playdate comes with a bunch of games but most of them are unknown and the handful shown so far don't seem $200 worthy IMO.
If these could play the playdate’s games, you’d have a point. As it is they are not substitutable products, so price is not the only factor determining sales volume.
Playdate is a boutique product selling a few tens of thousands of units. In fact the games are unique.
The fact that there are other cheaper games which sell in much larger volumes is irrelevant to whether there is a market for a boutique gaming experience.
We know they don’t substitute because if they did, people wouldn’t buy the playdate.
No, all we know is that the people buying the playdate think they don't substitute. Whether these people end up being correct is completely speculative at this point. I'd like to hear an analysis why the same experience couldn't be had elsewhere, preferably by a seasoned game designer.
We know for certain that the games are exclusive to the play date and were written for the platform. Therefore we know that the same experience cannot be had elsewhere.
Even if the titles weren’t contractually exclusive, no other handheld device has the same combination of inputs, notably the crank, so ports of the games would not play the same.
Even if neither of these were true (which they are) we know the games are currently exclusive and have not been ported. Temporary exclusivity is a standard way to create non-substitution in entertainment businesses.
(I was a developer at a successful games company for 4 years. Not that an appeal to authority has any relevance. The facts are public.)
The crank isn't special. They're making it out to be, but it isn't. Any device with an analog stick can achieve the same. In 1996 Super Mario 64 on the then-new Nintendo 64 had players spinning the analog stick in rotary motion to spin Bowser by the tail. The Steam controller (and the new Deck) have track pads that can emulate rotation. The Nintendo DS had a touch screen you could draw circles on. Every computer mouse since like 30 years ago has had a scroll wheel. Heck in my local game museum there's an ancient Pong game console and the controllers literally have only knobs to twist to move the paddles. Stop pretending like this is some novel innovation.
People spend thousands on shoes?
The kind of weird thing with the "sneaker drop" phenomenon, as I understand it, is that it's shoe companies releasing fairly small batches of all their products at not-insane prices, and there being a fully developed secondary market of shoe reselling where the demand-based price inflation kicks in.
And yet they sold 20K of them in 20 minutes...
Same reason ebikes do not have regenerative braking and cars do not have solar panels. It's not worth it.
It's more similar to the arduboy which is around £50
Back to my point though, this seems like the natural evolution of something like Pico8 or the other fantasy consoles. Not anything close to a competitor for normal gaming or even retro gaming, perhaps something more like the modern version of the demoscene.
It's expensive, I don't deny that, but I think calling it "Hipster garbage" or "Something for blue checkmarks" is just missing the point of what it is. I don't blame people for saying that, when I first heard of it I thought the exact same thing, but actually now I think its something to really look forward to.
Consumers aren’t rational and pricing without data isn’t a science. It’s really that simple.
I doubt Panic did very much research into how much similar hardware sells for. They probably anchored the number around the amount of money they spent on engineering the thing and the expected number of units they’d be able to sell. Not to mention, 20000 x 179 (minus costs and taxes) isn’t a lot for a 10 person company. Decent chance they are in the negative if you include opportunity cost.
If you’re planning a HW launch, you should go back through their EDM and Social media accounts and take note of how they communicated.
A word of warning, don’t rely on an Apple Watch for important alarms:
Set Alarm on Apple Watch 2.57am Sydney time (3min before launch). Kept watch on silent mode as to not wake wife with other notifications. Alarm didn’t go off. :-(
The only way I think you could address it in retrospect would be to have separate launches for US and international — or at least separate allocations (using registration data from interested users and traffic before lead up to help make estimates on demand) of units, say 15,000 US units and 5,000 international or whatever, depending on how you want to mix it. That isn’t a perfect solution either and you can either over or under allocate, but it would probably appear to be more “fair” to international buyers.
But lbr, anyone buying stuff like this internationally is unfortunately always on the losing end. The same is true for US buyers who are after stuff primarily shipped in Europe or Asia or Oceania. It is unfortunate, but until you have the scale to truly have separate international storefronts and sales teams, people outside of the main market are always going to be lower on the list.
I'm uniquely positioned to talk about this as I provide a free Shopify Shipping App that I'd imagine would use the same APIs as the "third-party international shipping plugin" you talk about.
Shopify has identified 3rd party app server capacity as an issue with "flash sales", and this is why they've been throwing a bunch of dev time in getting web assembly to run out of the browser and on the server. Their aim is that they'll run the App's code on the app dev's behalf. Web assembly was chosen for sandboxing.
Here ends my knowledge!
Or are shipping and tax rates so complex, and there are so many different ones (depending on state/province) that it's stricly impossible to do this without a plugin?
Huh! I thought they would use wifi for that. I guess "magic" works too.
[1]: https://help.play.date/orders/when-will-units-actually-start...
Compare the cost to a PS5 game like the recent Ratchet & Clank - the RRP in the UK is £70. I know my 3 year old and I will easily get £200 of comparable value from this, even if it is a bit janky and gimmicky. I’m also keen to support some of these random projects as they seem to have some real passion driving them. As I said, maybe I’m not totally objective, but i’m hopeful there’ll be a couple of real gems in the games they have coming out on this. I’m sure we’ll have a few weekends of good fun playing about with the SDK making some stuff as well.
People who've had a chance to use one generally disagree.
> Looks painful to hold,
People who've had a chance to use one generally disagree.
> the games look like crappy flash games in monochrome
The graphics look like low-res 2D monochrome graphics. If that's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
> the crank is just going to break off.
[citation needed]
> What am I missing?
You're assuming the absolute worst about a product you've never seen, held, or used yourself.
This thing would've been cool at $50, because it's probably built better than the $20 no-name Chinese consoles (https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...). But it definitely reminds me of them, especially with its catalog of super generic games that seem like Wii/Mario Party-style mini games... that you have to wait weeks for. At least those no-name Chinese ripoffs come with dozens to hundreds of games to start with.
This whole thing just screams "marketing gimmick" all around, like so many junky Kickstarter gadgets that come and go to much fanfare (Ouya comes to mind). Why the hell does it cost so much? It's like someone put together an Arduino tech demo and slapped a designer case on it and marked it up 10x. shrug
Again, maybe I'm just not the target market. I'm just struggling to understand who is. Someone else explained it: the makers of these things are apparently famous designers in some circles (music synths, boutique apps). Good for them, I guess, but for a regular ol' gamer like me, no thanks... for portable gaming, I'm much more excited about the Steam Deck or even Stadia/GeForce Now/xCloud on Android + a gamepad adapter.
If the Playdate can deliver to me something novel and genuinely fun and engaging, that's the value. Will it? That remains to be seen, but it's what Panic is selling.
It's also not a competitor to the NES classic or any of the third party emulator-based devices. I've already played those games back when the NES was around, then played them again on various emulators. I'm ready for something different.
I think the Ouya is a good comparison. The Playdate's story is about recruiting indie developers more effectively than the Ouya did, and organizing game distribution differently (seasonal releases instead of an app store). The fact that the Playdate sold 20k units in 17 minutes tells me that maybe they're right. But on the other hand, the Ouya sold 200k units over its lifetime and still failed so maybe 20k is not that impressive after all?
You also made several other objections: uncomfortable to hold, crank is likely to break, adults are likely to get bored in 10 minutes. None of the reviews out so far have supported any of these objections. The ArsTechnica review is pretty comprehensive[1], but there are a handful of others floating around.
I also think it's telling that you compared "Crankin Time Travel Adventure" (Playdate game) to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time in another of your posts. A much better comparison would be to the indie game Braid. Apologies if I'm reading too much into this, but if you haven't heard of Braid it makes me wonder if you're more of a traditional gamer than an indie gamer that this is targeted at?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/playdate-preview-you-...
I have no idea what it would take to play a homemade game on a Switch or Xbox (the two consoles I own). As for Steam, I can probably make that work but at that point I'd just use the Mac App Store or my own site. In this regard the PD just feels more .... welcoming/simpler I suppose. So at least for me, $180 doesn't seem crazy.
I also give Panic a lot of "benefit of the doubt" as I have been using their software for two decades and know that they make quality things and care deeply about the overall experience and customer satisfaction and such; so the investment feels far less risky than if it was some random startup (I had never heard of Teenage Engineering before this product, so they were not a factor in this regard).
I don't think your take is wrong; just that this device doesn't strike your fancy and that is perfectly fine. But maybe my motivations behind buying one can reveal one possible reason for someone to willing choose it over (or in my case, in addition to) the other options.
Remember those single game portable consoles you could get in the early 2000s, like there was battleship and random Atari clones? That's what I thought this was, with a few more silly diversions. It just seems like it'd hold an adult's attention for all of 5-10 minutes. Not worth $179.
If I wanted actual indie games that are worth my time, Steam has a much more enticing selection.
But, I didn't realize there was designer cache behind it. That's worth nothing to me but valuable to some people I guess.
The cost is in the development of the included games, which I'm willing to bet few people are going to be actively interested in ever single game.
I'd much prefer to see a $50 version that I could buy the games I want to, rather than a $180 version and being forced to buy every game as part of the purchase price
> Requires USB power source.
Somehow they invented a non-portable handheld device. It doesn't even have a battery! Was there really no way to make these games work offline? Or at least some of them?
Edit: I'm wrong, it both doesn't need wifi and has a battery. Website text wasn't phrased too well but that's partly on me.
> It doesn't even have a battery!
It has a battery, it doesn't come with a wall wart or other device to drive power over the provided USB cable to do the charging.
Specs are on this page: https://help.play.date/hardware/
With regard to wifi, I think they worded that poorly. It has no other network connection (not even bluetooth to connect to your phone or computer, though bluetooth will be eventually capable of supporting audio) for receiving updates and new games. You won't need that in general unless the specific game or device feature (like system updates) you're using requires a network connection.