sure, but I’ve seen that argument made of markedly more obtrusive/expensive VR hardware and I’d reject it there; if you allow that they’re pricing the games at the equivalent of $5 each, then the console costs as much as a controller, which is probably the right comparison, to novel input devices with silly margins
personally i find the marketing smarmy but the playdate itself looks kind of interesting. i for one bemoan the loss of platform identity frequently, such that a statement like
seems to be coming from a place of full-throated embrace (or at least invisible acceptance) of the status quo of near-total platform featurelessness and homogeneity
the problem is they are making something “neat” rather than something good and sustainable. i don’t know that this can get enough traction to be more than a curiosity. without reasonable adoption, this platform will just be abandoned in a rather short timeframe, and it already feels like something you would absolutely not want to spend money on if you’re trying to maximize your value in any way… a used switch lite versus this, hell even a fucking game boy advance probably will give you more total lifetime enjoyment than this thing
so, obviously it’s meant to be neat and maybe make Panic some money, but it will never be more of a novelty at the price point they are selling it at with the capabilities it possesses… fine! but it hardly feels worth talking about. i feel bad for everyone who makes their games for this shit because surely if any large number of people ever get to play these games it’ll be via some emulator or whatever later down the line. sans crank…
right? idk it feels like some bougie fuckshit. no one really believes the games that are on this thing will actually be better than the shit you can already get on fucking itch.io, right?
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right!
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i should try to work out that tic, i picked it up while mentally protesting its use
real talk though i would absolutely pick up a playdate for like 50 USD and mess around with it and probably enjoy the heck out of it. i just want it to be an actual thing, sold competitively so they can create a platform. but i get that’s not the most profitable approach. for stuff like this, there’s a “boutique product” roadmap and it does not involve the things i’m interested in
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I didn’t mean to draw attention to your word usage, I just emphatically agree with what you wrote.
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Absolutely, I think all the devs went into this with the understanding that they were just making games for the launch package. It’s not a platform, it’s a toy, and what it launches will probably be all it ever has.
I think that’s why they were caught flat-footed when people asked for open development; it’s just going to be shipped and done.
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I want to work on a Playdate emulator that maps the crank to a mouse wheel
Yes, I have an incredible computer on my person at all times and an even better one at my desk and I don’t see a point in making software exclusive to special game-only computers destined to be disused within a decade.
Controllers, on the other hand, are cool.
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I want a version of Bit Generations Digidrive where whenever you unleash your polygon to propel the ratchet, instead of just pausing the game as it rises, it turns into a minigame where you have to spin the crank as fast as possible
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one last addendum which wow what am i using my typing spoons for lmao is i also kind of appreciate that a big company like nintendo can make devices at larger scales and reduce costs but i still think panic is largely by choice doing things in a way that ensures it is only exactly a toy which i think sucks
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The “toy” approach seems calculated to guarantee the project as a whole breaks even. They presumably have a preexisting contact list of people they know for sure are interested and are price-insensitive (a.k.a. yuppie hipsters), and they set a price such that if those people (and only those people) buy the Playdate, then their spreadsheet says their company doesn’t go into debt.
Putting myself in their shoes, if their company is too small to absorb a significant risk of a loss, they might feel the only choice they have is between “toy” or nothing.
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yeah, i mean all jokes aside, i think it’s been pretty clear from the beginning that they are trying to create a weird, idiosyncratic arttoy, not to replace the GBA or whatever. it seems totally appropriate to not want to buy one, but hard to be mad about it. it’s not like what they are delivering is all that different from what the thing was when it was announced. may as well go yell at a shitty weird bar band for not being U2 or w/e
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Assuming it had to be hardware at all. They’ve already published a successful cross-platform indie game and this could be a huge anthology with the same concept. Like Guild01 with more focus.
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it’s more like this device highlights the sorts of things that could exist, but don’t - what is their hardware worth? does the crank matter to anyone? it’s beyond being a toy, it seems almost intentionally pointless. how can you look at this and not be like, oh so someone could make something and this is almost it
the “almost” bit makes it important to actually vocalize those issues because it can be complicated. e.g. does everyone even agree “it’s not for me?” are some of us not, in fact, the target market for this?
i dunno, i don’t think it’s foregone
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i don’t know what i mean by the above other than it’s both worth talking about in concept and not worth talking about in practice despite there probably being some cool stuff on there because like… i really don’t want to buy one
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yea… i think it probably is? idk
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Video games
intentionally pointless
I like 8 and 16 bit game systems, like the NES and the Genesis.
Was there a point to discontinuing those systems in favor of more modern ones?
Bear in mind, Tectoy has been selling the Master System in Brazil for 30 years.
If Poly’s Roly Rumble was coming out on Game Boy I’d be equally excited for it.
But, if the Playdate wasn’t a little Game Boy like system and was instead an anthology for Switch/PC/PS4/PS5, what would decide the limitations the anthology was built around? Maybe one game decides it should be a 5+ button game, and another wants to be in color and another wants to have polygons.
Would they really be the same games?
I like 2D games with very few buttons.
I like black and white.
I like the Game Boy. I like the Arduboy.
I think I’ll like the Playdate.
The hardware is a deciding factor in what can be designed for it.
The games will be the games they are because they were built for the Playdate.
The games look really interesting to me, and so does the hardware, and I don’t think the two can fairly be removed from each other.
Even if the games were ported to the Switch after being released on the Playdate,
playing a Playdate game on a Switch would mean playing it on a chunky handheld with a whole slew of needlessly just there buttons, the experience wouldn’t quite be the same.
A pocketable underpowered two button black and white game system is pointless.
How many buttons are on a PS5 controller? Isn’t there something similarly pointless in that?
It’s all just entertainment and our preferences within that.
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This is a fair point but at the same time there are more billionaires, venture capital and private equity firms than ever and they’ve all got more money sloshing around ready to invest in every economic sector than they know what to do with. It would not be super hard to put together a business plan that, while maybe not making Playdate a direct competitor with Nintendo or Apple or whoever, could still be a whole lot more ambitious than what they landed on.
I don’t fault them for playing it safe but fortune favors the bold and so on. Unless you’re specifically in the demographic this device is directly targeting the whole thing is just a nonentity at best and at worst an aggravating display of like, saying to everyone screw the moon, the stars and even the fences and the outfields we’re shooting for second base.
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I worry that it’s a hop, skip and jump from those Steam reviews to the tune of “this is too expensive for an 8-bit game” on anything that isn’t a AAA 3D game to bugging out that the Playdate isn’t just a phone app or whatever.
Has accessible emulation also devalued anything that feels technically limited?
still crazy to me the people who made the ftp client i always pirated in 2005 are now making a twee artisan console
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idk as someone who enjoys old bootleg gameboy multicarts, Action 52, those new little consoles with titles like Retro Arcade Game Controller 500-In-1, i thought the playdate looked pretty cool if intrinsically a bit more blandly aspirational as a version of that concept. i think the appeal of those things is the sense of an unrecognizable snapshot of the format as the whole: one where all the familiar reference points have been omitted or had the serial numbers filed off, and whatever arbitrary grouping of titles is presented with the hermetically sealed authority of The Canon. hey, kids: all your favourites. choose from Slime, Slime 2, Cement Land, Strawberry Tussle, Xapaz II, Horrible Bird, Qworp!, Strangle House, Turtle Rancher Gold and Linda Nochlin’s Putting Challenge.
it’s sort of fetishistic as a conceit for an actual object but i guess that doesn’t annoy me when it’s so obviously a derivation of the existing background context of 2000000 indie games, as opposed to something presented as an alternative to that (in the vein of apple arcade etc). it did surprise me to hear there’s an internet connection in this thing, along with game updates etc: i get the reasoning but it seems so counter to the appeal of these things as slightly truculent alien objects. anyway everything twee about playdate is part of mankind’s collective punishment for sleeping on GameDog.
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