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The Story of Playdate (panic.com)
109 points by tonyedgecombe on Aug 25, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments


I haven't looked forward so much to a piece of hardware since the iPhone came out! Everything about it is just _cool_. Playdate promises to let me

- 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!


Oh, you were one of the 20000 who snatched up the first batch in the first 17 minutes? It says 2022 for me.


You'd better believe it! I made a calendar reminder just for the occasion.


Will this platform become as restricted as Apple's iOS, eventually if it becomes successful? Or will managers sit on their hands and leave the platform alone? My money goes to the first option.


It's made by panic, so I am leaning towards the second option.


I'm unreasonably excited for this dumb thing. I'm a big fan of Game & Watch games and can't wait for my pre-order to get fulfilled.


It's funny how the internet has enabled small-batch consoles like this to even exist in the first place. 20 years ago this would have been considered DOA (a Gameboy with a crank, sans games), but nowadays there's a large enough (and connected enough) community to make something like this work, even in small batches.

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.


I'm almost tempted to buy one for no other reason than to try writing a few games for it.


Likewise, it feels like new territory with wonderful hardware to try creating something you otherwise probably wouldn't.


I had the same thought, but I just started messing around with Pico8.


Do you have any interesting projects in mind?


Not really, which makes me glad I didn’t buy a playdate to use for game dev.


This is why I ordered 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.


there's also the arduboy for something even simpler


Fantasy consoles have filled that void for me, but I totally understand if you want to push beyond here.


I think a lot of the appeal is about truly original content.


It’s also capitalism - this became economically viable through endless technological progress and globalization, a risk was taken, the market was validated, and what once required millions of sales to be viable now is tens of thousands. This is a free market success.


A product that has yet to turn a profit, but is sold nevertheless just for the sake of it.

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.


They sold out in minutes of the initial batch. Expecting a centralized bureaucracy to create this is so moronic I don’t even know where to begin. Or maybe I don’t understand your brilliant “communitized production” methodology but certainly it takes freedom away from entrepreneurs and results in higher taxes to fund some politician’s project.


Basically, projects shouldn't need to be profitable just to exist. Have a universal basic income, give the people the freedom to create more small and creative projects like the Playdate, which people clearly want despite it not necessarily being profitable.


The Trabi (east german car) sold out in minutes, so that is a non argument since corelation does not imply causation. Where do you get that bueraucracy idea from? Stalinism? That's not what people envision when they want UBI and a strong social system.

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.


Half the country doesn’t pay a nickel in federal income tax so I don’t know where the middle and lower class tax burden is. You are so all over the place it’s hard to make sense of what argument you are trying to make, if there even is an argument buried in this mess. I think you don’t understand economics, government, or psychology at any basic, rational level.


I'm sorry you can't follow the trail of thought. Your rambling ad-hominem don't make you seem to be the rational type though, despite your assertions.


I think the appeal is that commercial vendors mostly won’t build for playdate because the market will be small. So it will be a real auteur community.


I'm still trying to understand at what scale Playdate moves from a hobby to a viable business. Panic sold 20k units in 20 minutes, which is impressive, but probably not yet enough to pay for the years of development cost accrued.


I don't think they went into this as a profit-making venture. Obviously they don't want to lose money on it, but it was supposed to be something much simpler and a celebration of 20 years in business, and they wanted it to be a piece of hardware because they'd never done that before.

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.


Yes, all the stuff I've seen from Panic about this sounds like "we did this because it's cool" not "we did this to make money". And I guess if you own a successful software company you have enough money to make something cool like this as your hobby. But it's being sold like it's a gaming platform and I'm wondering how long it will last as a platform if it doesn't pay the bills.


Surely they’ll figure something out on the way.


> Panic sold 20k units in 20 minutes

The sales-power of injection mold plastics.


Can someone tell me what the company Panic is all about? I've seen their (neat) building in Portland. And the Playdate sounds cool. That's all I know about them. Is there more?


I heard about them first in 2010 because of their super stylish Mac apps: Coda (a text editor focused on HTML/CSS) and Transmit (an FTP/SSH client).

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


Portland, OR software company that builds stuff for Apple products that started in the late 90s. It got its start with Audion, one of the first music players for classic Mac OS (their competitor SoundJam was acquired by Apple and turned into ITunes). They're well-known for making high quality, highly polished native Mac apps like Transmit and the Coda/Nova text editors, as well as publishing games like Firewatch (Campo Santo) and Untitled Goose Game (House House).


They make f'ing good Mac (mostly) and iOS software.


I learned about them after playing the game Firewatch on steam. I really really enjoyed that game.


I absolutely loved Firewatch, and the second playthrough with the audio tour tapes scattered throughout the world was just as enjoyable.

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.


Firewatch was amazing but Campo Santo and some of its alums didn’t exactly foster a “shipping” culture. They’ll fit in well at Valve. (I write this with love and a bit tongue-in-cheek! They’re all amazingly creative folks.)



Really looking forward to this, though I cancelled my preorder (I got in too late and decided I may as well wait for release).

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


Any update on the SDK? Would love to start playing eighths emulator and the APIs.

Have some ideas for applications and want to see if they are possible.


Pretty cool stuff. Is there plans to make software/hardware libre? To unlock the bootloader so the hardware can be reused for another purpose?

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.


[flagged]


Elaborate please saying "Panic sucks" from the username "panicbadb" makes me lol though




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