I woke up at 3AM AEST, when preorders were supposed to go live.
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.
Hopefully the SDK is available before hardware ships, or at least day one. I'm tempted to beg for early access to it. Although I'm excited about the launch games, I really bought it for development. I don't want to wait 6 months or a year to deploy to it
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)? :)
I was very impressed by their queuing system at first. Shop loaded quickly, I got added to the queue and was able to start shopping soon enough.
However international shipping broke (not their fault) spewing out wrong error messages. That got resolved, but by then 2021 orders had been sold out. I received a „item out of stock“ error (even though they promised it won’t sell out) until I realized I had to remove and re-add the playdate to my cart (switching from the 2021 batch to the 2022 one).
Better error messages could’ve saved me a lot of frustration!
This reminds me a lot of the famous Slashdot iPod comment: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."[0]
...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.
Let's be real... this isn't an iPod/Dropbox moment.
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)
Yes, I very much doubt that this will be a vast consumer success like the iPod/Dropbox/etc. (Though since they've already sold through their initial run, it's probably going to be a success for Panic! at least.)
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.)
The difference is the iPod/Dropbox people had the context and lacked vision. Here this person lacks context and has a very realistic vision.
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
> This is every bit as pretentious as it seems, and literally requires a high price attached to it for it's target market...
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.
If Apple advertised as little as Creative Labs did, it probably would not have done much better than the Nomad. iPods were far from perfect products, and non-iPod players were not all clunky ripoffs.
What's the appeal of a Supreme t-shirt, a Star Wars collectable figure, an NFT, a designer handbag? This is simply a famous brand which has looped in famous game creators and media contacts to generate buzz, and they are catering to people with a lot of disposable income who are into consumer tech – so, the exact demographic of this website.
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.
you could buy two retroids for less than the cost of this novelty garbage and you now have a multiplayer gaming experience and a linux environment with proven SDK's and interoperability but heres the dealbreaker: no crank.
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.
> 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.
"The Season" is frankly just a season pass with more steps. until any of these games get made and reviewed, its an empty system that doesnt even ship with a game.
FYI: NONE of the games listed on their season page have a release date.
Granted, this is taking them at their word, but they're certainly claiming that they'll be shipping two of those games every week for the first 12 weeks after the system ships.
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.
They have failed to adequately explain this detail: the season starts when you power up the machine, delivering two games a week for 12 weeks. So the games release when they first start shipping the first units.
Oh, that's interesting. I had been assuming it'd be a more universal release schedule. I wonder how the people getting their devices after the early orders have already received all the games are going to feel about it.
> you could buy two retroids for less than the cost of this
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.
A retroid is an off-the-shelf quad core CPU running android and an emulator. The playdate is an actual custom console platform inspired by retro designs.
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.
It has a very nice industrial design language and it's whimsical, a combination which appeals to some people I guess.
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.
I'm with you, I totally don't get the market for this. Then again, I'm an old curmudgeon who can't stand it when kids are playing ForkKnife on his lawn.
I mostly agree. I think it looks kinda neat, but not at that price. I remember when all the podcasters were pushing it last year and the buzz died off. Then when the buzz started again recently I thought it had already come out and faded away...guess not.
I get the feeling this has been incorrectly marketed, purposefully or not.
At least for me, this feels like the natural evolution of Pico8 and other fantasy consoles. For that reason, the retroid isn't really comparable, and for that reason the price is worth it to me, even if it is very pricey.
That retroid definitely has much worse marketing than the playdate. I read through the retroid website, and don't really know what it is. She sort of Android tablet with physical buttons? The Website mentions ROMs, but for what? Does it like come preloaded with some sort of game boy emulator?
Playdate plays new exclusive games by notable, acclaimed indie developers. The games appear on the device like magic through no effort of the user.
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).
I can't find much information about the screen other then the fact that it is 1 bit. Is this purely an aesthetic decision or is there some sort of interesting tech going on that requires it to be 1 bit for now?
The panel itself is 1-bit, and is definitely a concious choice they made. I can't remember where I read it, but the screen was the most expensive component, and was likely pricier than color options. It's also super-reflective, so apparently very visible in a lot of lighting conditions, sort of like e-ink but with a great refresh rate. I beleive it's the same panel as this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
Silly question - what does "Super reflective" mean in this context?
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.
You're thinking of backlit displays where a reflective front (between the user and the display) hurts screen visibility in bright light conditions. In this context, "super reflective" is referring to _behind_ the pixels of the display. There is no backlight, so the screen is lit up by ambient light. Increasing that reflectivity aids in contrast of the screen, since "white" pixels will be "whiter" (in this case they are actually grey but lighter grey if the screen is more reflective).
Sorry, reflective was the wrong choice of words, I think technically 'transflective' is more accurate. I don't think the screen will have much glare, it's more that it is visible with a small amount of light, despite not having a backlight.
'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'.
FWIW, many fitness watches that are designed for outdoor use (e.g. most Garmin or Amazfit models) still use transflective displays. They work flawlessly in bright sunlight, a backlight works well in the dark, and the battery life benefits compared to AMOLED or similar is an added bonus.
The Game Boy Advance SP had a reflective screen with a toggle-able front light. The Game Boy Advance, and all other Game Boys before it, had unlit screens.
Just a guess but maybe it means that the "on" pixels will reflect back more ambient light, thus appearing brighter and having better contrast with the dark "off" pixels under marginal lighting conditions?
I love Teenage Engineering, but talk about a horrible price point. $200 can buy you a Nintendo Switch these days, or half a Steam Deck. Without the viral marketing/limited supply, this wouldn't have moved half the units it did.
If you want to play steam games or Nintendo games this isn’t the device for you. If you want to play Playdate games then this is your best bet. In other words, apples and oranges.
It's like a contractor who needs a truck wondering why someone would buy a Mini. They are similar, but the market needs they solve are totally different.
Honestly if you "love" Teenage Engineering then you should be willing to fork out $200 for this. Think of it more as the tech equivalent of a sneaker drop. No one asks why Yeezys go for thousands while you can get an equivalent running shoe for $50.
Sure, even if we ignore the sneaker thing. You've always been able to buy fancy dress shoes and boots for a lot of money. Granted, getting to thousands plural is a sure sign that you've gone over into excess, but...
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.
It's expensive when you consider you can get faster devices with better screens, more buttons etc. for less than half the price these days. A Retroid Pocket 2 is $80, has a 3.5" color screen, analog sticks, includes a 32GB microSD card, HDMI out and a quad core processor.
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.
I don't entirely agree. They've collaborated on all kinds of budget products (Ikea speakers, Nothing earbuds, etc.) and even sell quite a few low-cost modular synths. Their accessories are well-priced, and even the OP-Z holds it's own. As far as I know, Teenage Engineering used to make plenty of budget hardware, until the OP-1 took off and they halted production of everything else to focus on it (as well as raising the price).
> $200 can buy you a Nintendo Switch these days, or half a Steam Deck
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.
If only playdate games specifically (and even more specifically, potential future playdate games) weren't something so unique and revolutionary that one could be entertained by other, competing, more reasonably priced alternatives.
It’s not really clear what you are trying to say here. If you are trying to be sarcastic, it fails.
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.
> 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.)
"Exclusive" is different from "without substitute".
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.
Just guessing, but presumably it'd involve more hardware to support the charging, for a small increase in price/size/complexity, and (probably more importantly) change the feel of the crank to be much more resistant, which would change how the games that use it felt to play.
If you've ever bought an emergency hand-crank flashlight you'll see that it takes a tremendous amount of cranking on a pretty big coil to get a decent amount of electricity. On that small crank, you would probably have to crank for hours nonstop to get 20 mins of gameplay.
Because a B/W OLED could run for ages on a single charge and the required gear and protection for crank charging would add a lot of cost, bulk and price on the product for a feature which will be a funny gimmick for the first few days and then be useless.
Same reason ebikes do not have regenerative braking and cars do not have solar panels. It's not worth it.
Judging by some of the comments here and elsewhere, I get the feeling this has been incorrectly marketed, intentionally or otherwise. Luckily it seems like that marketing hasn't convinced many people so we probably (hopefully) won't see an excited pre-release period followed by a lot of anger and disappointment at release day.
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.
I feel as though many people here are trying to rationalize something that isn’t rational.
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.
To be honest, my little conspiracy theory (almost certainly wrong, yours is calculated whereas mine is probably based on a little bit of past frustration) is that the main driving force behind the high price is Teenage Engineering.
I own a lot of their devices, and actually the more I think about it, the more I can see where they fit. TE devices are generally very expensive for what you get, and often not great build quality (the playdate seems better, but thats not a purely TE project), but the fact is, you can't get what they make anywhere else. I hate the double trigs on my OP-Z, but there is no alternative.
Yes that’s a good point. If you factor in the cost of contracting TE in for this project they are definitely close to breaking even if not negative. Given that, my perspective is that I’m grateful something cool and different is being made in a field that’s dominated by large established players who operate with much larger budgets. Monocultures aren’t inherently bad but it’s been a bit too long since a new serious player entered this space.
Oh absolutely, I did preorder one afterall, despite the price ;)
The fantasy console handheld is something thats been much talked about and this seems like by far the most fleshed out version of that. I have a feeling a lot of people in this thread are thinking that all games are for the exact same audience, and thats the reason for some of the confusion and to some extent outrage.
I’ve been watching the launch process of Panic and it has been textbook awesome.
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. :-(
I don’t know if there is a good way to mitigate that more than Panic tried. They said they warned the provider in advance, the provider wasn’t ready. That’s a complication on the part of the Shopify platform and moving to a self-hosted/managed platform (like WooCommerce) might have solved the third-party shipping thing but would have then put the broader load balancing stuff at much higher risk.
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.
Setting aside today's issues with the Playdate launch, the fact that Shopify's plug-ins are setup this way has always seemed like a missed opportunity on Shopify's part. I used some plugins that were unreliable with only ONE user, nevermind thousands. Shopify should either provide standard infrastructure, or vet more legit plugin providers setups to handle X amount of concurrents.
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.
I don't know if I'm oversimplifying, but for the relatively small number of countries that the Playdate is shipping to, I wonder if it would have been possible to hardcode the shipping rates into Shopify, and not have to use a plugin, which was one of the weak links during today's launch?
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?
That's not true, at least not always. I have an Apple Watch and have to do the VPN authentication thing for work via a phone app. Both the phone and the watch display the notification (because I haven't turned that notification off on my watch). It doesn't hide it just because it shows up on one or the other. The only notifications, other than that, that I receive on either my phone or watch are messages (SMS/MMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, because we can't have enough messaging apps) and phone calls. They display on both devices. And I mean display, my phone display turns on and shows me the message, and my watch buzzes and shows it as well.
I'm wondering if there's a setting that would cause this.
I find the Apple watch to be super annoying. Out of the box it reminds you to breath, stand up, go to sleep, etc. Like I was never able to do these things before by myself. Once I turned everything off it's a bit more reasonable doing the only things I really needed, which was to tell time and maybe let me know my pace when running.
IMO, getting any notifications (VPN included) on a tiny 1 inch screen are stupid and that's what I have a phone for.
It really sounds like you bought the wrong device.
Even Garmin's less expensive GPS watches would give you exactly what you wanted for half the price (maybe even less) of the Apple Watch and without the notifications.
To be clear, you can load games via USB. It exposes a filesystem with a games folder that you can just drop code into. The required wifi might be for license checking for the games in the subscription or something.
does anyone know if there's going to be some kind of preorder cutoff? I've been waiting to get my hands on one of these for development but I can't afford one right now.
it sounds like they don’t intend to declare “sold out” but delivery is at a slower pace because they’re facing the same hardware shortages as everyone else
But... why? It's so janky. Looks painful to hold, the games look like crappy flash games in monochrome, and the crank is just going to break off. What am I missing?
It's a combination of nostalgia for a (largely imagined) bygone era of handheld devices, plus the fact that two relatively famous boutique hardware manufacturers/developers are involved (Panic! and Teenage Engineering). People will buy this for $180 for the same reason people still buy TE's OP-1 synthesizer for well over $1k when there are more feature-rich devices available for half the price or less. They're paying for the design, the ecosystem, the aesthetic, and to some extent, as a "lifestyle" purchase.
Buy a DE-10 Nano and get MisterFPGA running on it. It’s been great replaying arcade perfect classics like Pac-Man and Space Invaders and also being able to dive into classic SNES and MegaDrive games that I missed out on the first time around. Exploring some other totally missed systems like TurboGrafx which basically never got sold here or only at totally crazy prices has been fantastic as well. It’s got an amazing & friendly community building up around it as well.
You've probably heard of Panic, they made Coda, Nova, Prompt, there's another one that's escaping me right now... and a bunch of other apps. Untitled Goose Game.
I'm assuming the worst about a product I've never seen, perhaps, but only because I've used plenty of other products at a similar price point that seem MUCH better: Switch, Vita, various Android phones -- all mature technologies using much better hardware designed with proper adult ergonomics and with huge game libraries. And then for not much more you're into Xbox Series S and Oculus Quest 2 territory. Or for much less, you can get the $60 NES Classic/Sega Genesis Mini/Atari Flashback X with actual proven, authentically historic games for some real nostalgia. Or make your own MAME/Dolphin/etc. cabinet in any form factor you want. I got a Carmen San Diego portable console as an xmas stocking stuffer last year, and THAT thing was awesome, featuring surprisingly retro but functional controls, a beautiful screen, a silly Mac Classic lookalike case, and the full fidelity of the old game. It also cost $20, not $200. Any of those would offer more gameplay and a tremendously better value.
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.
I say this to make a point, not to be rude: I am bored by your enumeration of ways to play games that offer "better value" than the Playdate. You are describing platforms that are already open to me, and games that I have already played.
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.
I can offer a slightly different reason for getting one (I preordered one): learning. I have published a few mobile apps, and have toyed with the idea of making a game but haven't felt quite "ready" for that yet. The extremely low barrier to entry on the PD ($180 gets the hardware, SDK is free, and the platform is open so you can distribute anyway you want) is the primary reason I am excited about it. the limitations of the platform just feel less daunting.
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.
You've made much of the $179 price in your various posts in this thread. I think the answer to that is that you're on a forum for highly paid professionals who can afford an extra gaming device at this price point. I don't think many people are deciding between a Switch and a Playdate. Probably all of the preorders are people who already own a Switch and/or Xbox. If gaming is your primary hobby and you have a good income, this is not unreasonable-- people with other hobbies (hunting, fishing, traveling, scuba diving, photography, flying, etc) will sometimes spend more than $179 per hour of engaging in said hobby and no one bats an eye.
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?
This product wasn’t designed for people like you I suppose. For example, there are lots of people who are excited about this that aren’t excited about the Steam Deck. Gaming is a big market with lots of niche submarkets.
The internet will tell you that eating at a Michelin star restaurant is a waste of money because you could just go to McDonald's. Personally, I think both have their place.
There are some very novel, occasionally brilliant things on HN. This just doesn't happen to be one of them, IMO. Fun at $50, extremely overpriced at nearly $200 considering the competition. No real innovation. A crank that rips off Sands of Times's primary mechanic, except you have to take your hands off the already tiny thing to crank a tinier crank? Cool, I guess...? To each their own.
Thanks for letting us all know, in no uncertain terms, how you feel about this thing that you don't want to buy. It's very important that we all hear about how you don't like this thing you haven't tried.
I’m possibly not the most rational when it comes to these things as I have one on order, as well as an Analog Pocket, ZX Spectrum Next and Switch Deck. The price point seems fairly reasonable to me when you consider hardware and software development costs, plus overheads like marketing, infrastructure etc. It’s unlikely to ever be seriously mass market.
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.
If they just put the games on any indie storefront and allowed demos, videos, reviews, etc. like any other game, I'd be thrilled to support them. But locking them into a 1-bit $200 gimmick? That's not a good way to get their passion project out. Dwarf Fortress, on the front page these same days... now THAT's a passion project. Arguably X-plane too. Both of which deliver tremendous value for pennies compared to this.
Why buy a Switch when you can get a cheap retro handheld for half the price? Because not all gaming handhelds are meant for the same thing.
The Switch and similar devices are meant for "mainstream" gaming, the retro handhelds are meant for retro games, the playdate is meant for fantasy console games.
I mean, I get that. As a throwaway novelty gadget it seems fun enough to splurge $50 on. My first reaction was "oh cool, someone made one of those game emulator in a box things and added designer flourishes, seems like a fun Kickstarter". And then I saw the $179 and was like wtf. My friends would probably see this and just ask why not get a Switch or Steam Deck or old Vita. Even a generic android NES emu for nostalgia.
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.
It's a $5 microcontroller and 1 bit display. The cost of this isn't in the BOM
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
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.
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.
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.