The Story of Playdate
panic.com
panic.com
- play a season of games, which is a nice way to get out of my usual genre rut - _write_ games for consumer-grade hardware - sideload whatever, like a Game Boy emulator
"Late 2021" can't come fast enough for me!
I still don't understand the appeal of the Playdate (I'd rather go emulate Castlevania), but I'm glad that people who are enthusiastic about it get to own one.
My skill set is strictly front-end with enough back-end chops to get by. I’ve never made a game but I’ve no shortage of ideas.
Enabled by large cross-financing of a otherwise sucessfull company that is driven by a dream and no profit incentive.
That's not a free market success, that's a poster boy for universal basic income and a case for communitized means of production.
Universal basic income reduces buerocracy, as it reduces the number of management required by classical welfare systems. It also increases freedom and enterpreneurship because it allows people to pursue their passion projects. Where's the freedom in having to wash plates to side fund your startup or pay of your giant student loan?
The reason why our tax systems are so bloated with bueraucracy is because neoliberalism has been pushing for tax breaks of the ultra wealthy for decades, which results in an increased tax burden on the middle and lower class. Since you can't tax those easily without risking stalling the economy you have to create these elaborate taxation schemes.
If you want to reduce bueraucracy start lobyying for a bracketed tax system that reduces the total tax rate for households up to 1 million per year and a quadratically increasing tax rate to 100% at 100 million. Include stock transactions in those numbers, and you might even have a decent chance at returning the stock exchanges back into a kickstarter like system of funding and rewards, instead of the grotesque casino like playground for HFT algorithms that it has become. At the same time abolish all other taxes. You should probably reuntroduce a pollution tax, to prevent companies profiting from externalising their costs, and frankly if we want some shot at climate change we need to introduce some incentive to not pollute the living hell out of our planet, and not dying in a 60C heatwave, flodding, tornadoes, or refugee crisis is apparently not incentive enough.
Less people taxed with less forms of tax means less management required. The walthier the people taxed, the less they are incovenienced by the tax.
Trickle down economy didn't work, and "but if people can't earn billions per year they won't work anymore" is a joke. It's time we structure our society around enterpreneuship, hard work and passion, instead of giving all the power to people that are a statistical artifact of an exponential reward system. Multi billionaire are a bug in capitalism not a feature, and you are not a temporarily embarrased billionair.
Fablabs are a good example of communized production. These should be state funded, just like schools are, combined with UBI, it'd give you the resources to tinker and experiment and a community for others to partake in that process. Less bueraucracy, less government, less involved state and politicians, yet more social, more community, more freedom.
In the linked podcast episode, they talk about it being a clock, but they wanted something more dynamic, like a Game&Watch system that sent a new game each week, but then they realized no one plays those simple games for more than 30 minutes tops, and it eventually evolved into a full-blown portable game system.
I hope this thing is popular and profitable enough that it gets a life of its own, so that it remains in production for years to come with regular new games. Because it sounds awesome, and I want one.
The sales-power of injection mold plastics.
Since then, they kept a low profile, doing unrelated things like the popular game/walking-simulator Firewatch, the “Untitled Goose Game” for the Nintendo Switch, releasing a Coda rewrite, and now this retro-surprise-console
I recently learned that Campo Santo (the studio that made the game) was planning on making another game in a similar style called In the Valley of Gods, but then found out later that they were bought out by Valve, and shortly after that development of the game was put "on hold" —and that was in 2019. That game is as good as dead. What a letdown.
Honestly whilst the season of games sounds like, it really interests me for home brew games, I've said before but Im really hoping it ends up as something like pico 8 (something which desperately needs an official handheld but as of yet doesn't have one). As another commenter pointed out, these more restricted fantasy consoles can just be funner to develop for
Have some ideas for applications and want to see if they are possible.
I like the concept of subscribing to a small software vendor to receive new games regularly and support creation, but i also like hardware i can tinker with.