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i felt like i saw an outline for the whole shape of the situation when one of the publisher dudes involved posted âhey if youâre marginalized and want to develop for this email usâ followed by âwoah a lot of you responded, very surprising, thanks for the interest, sorry if we donât get back to you promptly, or everâ followed by an extended period of going mutliple-threads-deep responding to bad-faith âyou did nothing wrongâ Gamer Reply Guys, doing the performative allyship thing by explaining why diversity is good actually, and that efforts to that end have made him significant income in his recent business endeavors (lol)
anyway they did send out a bunch of hardware to different (relatively established ofc) people but like who has the time and bandwidth to take a gamble on this sort of thing? the usual crowd who can afford to absorb the risk, naturally. itâs basically a (barely) better engineered pocket chip or whatever; you can develop for it in lua or c and it will ship with the sdk shortly if not immediately upon launch, theyâre just counting on the novelty-games audience to snap it up on the merits of colourful plastic and the name of a few established designers alone, which evidently is working out great
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A baffling thing about this shitshow with the Playdate event is that Playdate is a great name for an event and a pretty blah name for this device, imo.
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They definitively paid the people who made the original games for it in the same manner (and budget level, i.e. a month or two of work) of a commissioned museum game.
No one should develop additional projects for a niche like this out of any desire other than hobbyist. It is absolutely not a market or platform or blue ocean.
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Kotaku summarized an enormous twitter conversation.
Even shorter version: Playdate and Playdate are talking via email. Both Playdates can use the name Playdate. Playdate (game toy) are suggesting Playdate (event) add something to the name for disambiguation sake. Playdate (event) suggested Playdate Pop Up. Talks are still ongoing.
PlayCrank
CrankDate
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fielding pitches and funding projects is well and good but again, only certain circumstances make pursuing anything like that feasible in the first place, and itâs entirely unsurprising who exactly ends up funded. if they wanted the approval of the leftist twitter itchio crowd whose criticism theyâre now publicly handwringing over, that would have required a proactive effort.
feeling isfetâs post re. they should just own it for what it is instead of making a show of apologizing for not meeting an expectation they donât appear equipped for or interested in rising to in the first place
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In the end I guess there are enough people that will buy this for 150.
Iâm just clarifying the way this sort of thing occurs.
In general I donât feel comfortable with this sort of judgment from an internet storm which latching onto create specific targets for systemic issues, and, as noted above, there are clear contradictory voices being unheard. I donât like their ad copy or the voice they represent, either, but I donât feel comfortable defending them or judging them from this distance.
Gruber is an âeither you love him or you donâtâ figure in the Apple community but three members of the Playdate team were the guests on his podcast this week:
Hold on a second: Does this thing have a back light?
No
hahaha are you fucking kidding
Itâs HIGH CONTRAST.
Playdate developer survey went out for people who registered interest in the SDK. Notably, the survey asks if you are in an underrepresented minority, and Panic appears to have plans of subsidizing development hardware for creators who wouldnât be able to afford it without assistance.
Iâm kinda getting the vibe that the SDK isnât going to be available for download publicly on their site (at least not initially) which would be kind of a downer since itâs already of limited interest because itâs only available on the Mac.
If someone canât afford it without assistance how the hell do they afford a Mac
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itâs not for those people
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Hey did anyone get one of these? I am listening to All The Small Games year end episode and they are talking up the playdate.
Casual Birder sounds cute!
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I got mine about a year ago and I recorded a podcast a few months ago where I talk about the first season of games. I think the hardware is cool but few very of the games actually grabbed onto me.
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