400 × 240 1-bit display...and its pushing $200??!
even Retroids cheapest pocket at $70 crushes this hipster garbage. what is the appeal of playdate?
even Retroids cheapest pocket at $70 crushes this hipster garbage. what is the appeal of playdate?
...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.
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.
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.
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.
And even if it does, it's immoral to do so.
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).
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.