It must be fun to work at Panic. It reminds me of how tech companies were in the 90s. Clear mission, but open horizon.
To me this is the dream: a company that is so successful that you get to take risks and build cool things that you want to exist.
I want to make my own games for fun, but also to expose my son to the creativity and exploration of programming.
A physical console would make this experience so much more real.
Also this audience might be interested to know that soon there'll be Python support in MakeCode. More details on our language toolchain here [1]
Disclosure: I work for MakeCode :)
[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 [1] https://makecode.com/language
Not affiliated, just also interested in new and emerging easy to use game systems, and this is just the latest in a long line of them I've been playing with ..
[0] www.blockstudio.app
It's awesome and it comes with PICO-8 pre-installed (you only need to add the license key).
It can also run lots of emulators.
Source: know one of the lauch game developers, have cranked the prototype hardware
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935
So you could use any Raspberry Pi enclosure as a physical PICO-8 platform.
I think Dank Tomb's lighting is by far one of my favourite examples - https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line...
Anybody remember this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
Single-purpose hardware has identity. It has explicit purpose. If it is well-designed, it has an interface that is intuitive while encouraging a limited amount of experimentation. I think a lot of good software emulates these properties, but often with the tradeoff of being less extensible/integrable/power user friendly.
There already is, for me. I'd imagine a product like this depends on that nostalgia to a degree.
There is one example that is still firmly lodged in my head from the labs in my electonic engineering degree. It was this big box with a nice keypad, a screen that could display a few characters, and a big handle to lock in place the integrated circuit you wanted to test. You would slot it in, pull the handle, then type the ID numbers of the particular IC. If it was functioning as expected, the screen would say something like "OKAY" and that was all this thing did. Truly magical! On further googling and reflection I'm now not so sure about how big the handle was, but the machine was something like [1].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/top/ [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Digital-IC-tester-digital-in...
On a more pragmatic level, it feels more and more like companies creating semi-disposable toy electronics should be held to extremely high standards when it comes to how they source their components and the environmental impact of the lifecycle of their device, because this is ultimately cheap junk that’s hurting the environment.
FTFY
All products should be held to that standard, not just "semi-disposable toy electronics", which it's not even clear applies to this.
I don't think Panic is involved in organized crime, though.
I have never typed my email into a signup form so fast.
Put differently, limitations create interest, but they're also the opposite of cost-effective.
A new game, every Monday, delivered wirelessly to your pocket.
What excites me about Playdate is that it is something only an outsider with no attachments to existing business relationships could make.
Games released today are still encumbered by the regional and geographic thinking of traditional software distribution. While Steam, the App Store, etc have certainly democratised some aspects, they are still an exception to the traditional model that generates the most revenue.
Episodic games tried to bring seasonality to gaming. That didn’t really work (Episode 3 anyone?). Fortnite has been the most successful at it, but it is still a AAA game attached to a big publisher. It’s the evolution of the old model.
Playdate and Apple’s upcoming Arcade feel like the beginning of a new model and that’s really, really exciting.
Streaming services, like Google's recently announced Stadia will probably have similar compensation models.
I really think it harms the world by incentivizing creators to pad and fluff. Dickens is great, but you can really tell which of his works were published serially, because it affected how he wrote.
At the same time, paying a flat amount for each created work incentivizes creators to pump out a huge pile of small works. It's all singles and no albums, which I also think is bad.
The programmer part of my brain wonders if you could solve this by simply picking a function somewhere between O(n) (pay linearly by quantity consumed) and O(1) (pay a fixed price for the whole thing). The obvious middle point is O(log(n)).
I wonder how well it would work if creators were paid by time spent consuming but with a function that offerred diminishing returns the larger the quantity was?
Your sentiment is great, but I think the world has moved far beyond where you are coming from and that isn’t where Play will differentiate. The subscription new games is neat though, but iOS will have that this summer.
I think the key factor is content leveraging. How much the game's core systems can leverage assets to create varied gameplay. Because with seasons you have to help your customers get excited about relatively small batches of content.
Through that lens you find that narrative driven single player games are the worst candidates for seasonal games. It's more suited to match-based multiplayer games with sensitive meta games.
The first party stores do not make more money than Steam and other third party stores combined with mobile
I also don't really know what business model you're describing. Subscription with a weekly game drop? PSN is the subscription for online Playstation services and it comed with several free games a month. There are a few existing "stream any game" services as well, PSNow, Origin's subscription etc.
Here's what I think happened. They decided that they wanted to make a low power black and white game system for people to use while camping. They decided that a crank charger was the best solution for this and went ahead with development.
Further into the process they discovered that they couldn't get the power budget low enough to make cranking a viable option, but they were too far along to abandon it completely.
Then someone had a brilliant idea. Lets make the crank an input system, and develop crank based games.
The point standing that it was an odd choice for a game controller anyway you cut it and most likely wasn't through some UX problem solving process related to games.
Check out “red means recording” https://youtu.be/7z4hoazra_g
As a self-described inveterate hobbyist, I completely understand looking around a workshop full of parts and saying "gee, what could we do with that?" And buying parts completely at random just to full future sessions of "Mystery Meat Monday"
I'm sure someone could come up with this idea and probably did, but getting to the stage of actually releasing a commercial product with a crank makes me think there is more to the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaGF4z03UvY
You're literally shoving the other player out of the way.
Everyone loved the crank charger built into it, but it exerted really large forces on the chassis. Our industrial designers came to us and said "This is a totally solvable problem: We just need to make the chassis out of milled titanium!" We were like: "Thanks guys, but that's so far out of budget..."
When I first saw the Playdate I thought the crank was a really odd use, a one-trick pony. Then I saw that Teenage Engineering was partnering on the design and it totally made sense.
Is there a Hurdy Gurdy app yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_joystick_port#/media/Fil...
It was a great controller for some games, like Breakout.
Not speculating at all. Just wanted to point that out.
Think about vinyls, cassettes, VHRs, typing machines.
It's all about the cool factor, the "authentic", the "vintage". That's where the crank it's coming from.
The weirdo typing love letters on a mechanical type writer on the park bench. The weirdo cranking this thing on the subway, with his Air Buds on and the expensive sneakers.
https://www.amazon.com/Radica-Games-Bass-Fishing-Handheld/dp...
Especially if there's games that utilise the mechanic. could just have a much lower torque (and therefore lower-current-generation) since it's going to be used a lot. Missed opportunity.
Maybe at this point it's supplanted by smartphones?
Between Switch and a lot of great mobile games I'm not sure how it's stagnant.
A possible point of comparison for me would be Fujifilm’s very successful line of Instax instant cameras. They are similar to other cameras (phone, compact, DSLR, mirrorless) in that they take photos but framing them as a competitor to other cameras doesn’t make much sense.
Taking photos with them is much more expensive (given that nobody will give up their phone for an Instax camera and practically all phones today will take better photos than Instax cameras, just purely from a technical point of view, ignoring aesthetic preferences) and the photos you do take are just much more impractical than digital photos. But that doesn’t matter at all since all of that is not the point of Instax cameras.
In the gaming space the biggest actual competitor is still probably Nintendo, but not with their “normal” Games, more with their “weird” experiments like Nintendo Labo. I could actually imagine someone deciding between Labo and this.
Edit- looks like an SDK exists, it's just not available quite yet: https://play.date/media/
I wonder about the lack of backlighting though? Hopefully the screen is much better in this regard than the original non-backlit GBA, which was difficult to see in low light conditions.
It was tricky getting light to hit the screen in just the right way: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/13/lame-boy-advan...
$150 dollars is very expensive for a portable game system, which will compete with any tablet/phone that can play games that have better graphics and game play.
The problem is that this is competing with entire ecosystems of games that have been around for almost a decade.
This is more of a play on nostalgia and classic bulky simple handhelds. It would be in the same category as the NES Classic Edition or the Sega Genesis Mini. It's fun and almost a collectible honestly.
The NES class edition and Sega Genesis only work because of people that remember playing these games as a kid (like me). I have the NES classic edition and my teenage nephews were bored pretty quickly after they played it.
Nostalgia isn't usually there for something new that looks like the games I used to play when I was younger.
1] are infested with IAP/psycho crack time gates
2] cant cost more than a dollar or so, no one will buy them
3] have no buttons, and the number of games that work well without buttons is few.
4] have a horrible reputation, people discount games just for being mobile
5] ridiculously fragmented hardware, who knows what screen size or device type you're targeting if you develop for mobile?
6] are too high res. All new game systems are. Low res games with few buttons can be developed cheaply and quickly (i.e., 20k instead of 5M)
I want some simple games with real buttons. I want to make some. I'll pay for it. I think others will too.
I do think $150 is a little high, but that might also convey a sense of value, rather than "another crappy emulator box thing"
Both price points are in about the same range of disposable income for the target audience.
But $50 is a cheapo, side thing... as junky as the maker felt they could get away with. Not necessarily bad (Personally, I really appreciate things that are made as cheap as someone felt they could get away with, especially games. The cheapo-ness tells an interesting story and sometimes these things absolutely amaze me.) but usually pretty bad.
$150 is a centerpiece. It's a product that delivers at some decent level of quality/aesthetics. From the website I think they nailed that. (It looks like the handheld console you've made out of Lego and then imagined the details of what the real thing that the Lego model represents.)
So the $50 portable game is maybe too crappy to be a centerpiece gift (to another or to yourself), but maybe too expensive to fit in as a second-tier gift (e.g., a Christmas stocking-stuffer).
While this might qualify as "the gift of the year". (Or purchase for self of the year.)
The experience on the cheap device will probably be inferior in virtually every way to the phone you already have in your pocket.
But this device is different. Your phone doesn't have a crank. (Nor does whatever handheld system you may already have). It doesn't look like Lego. It doesn't have a black-and-white screen and it doesn't have a new, unique game coming out every week. (well your phone has seemingly a million games coming out each week, but in a diffuse, general way where you have to discover them for yourself and figure out for yourself if the IAP are too annoying or not, etc.)
Games are about new and fresh experiences so anything you already own and have been playing for 10 years is at a serious disadvantage, despite that it's cheaper to keep using it because you already own it.
I know devices like this often fail to thrive in the market, but Teenage Engineering has some experience making this sort of single-purpose device work for customers. Panic seems to be very passionate, quality and delivery oriented, and good at doing an exceptional job on familiar products. There might be some potential here. I'd absolutely take my chances on this thing if I could get my hands on one! My kids would love it too.
The main issues people have with it are 1) long-standing software bugs that don’t get fixed 2) TE doesn’t seem that focused on producing it anymore- it was out of stock for a couple years, and they raised the price significantly on the new batches.
made this in bed at 3am last night. sampled the vox straight from my phones headphone output into the line in on the op-1. its a beautiful piece of hardware that i take with me wherever i go.
2) It's 12 games to start with. I'm sure there could be more later on.
N++, Papers Please, Geometry Dash, Return of the Obra Dinn, Ori and the Blind Forest, 1001 Spikes, Hollow Knight, the list goes on. Then you have things like The Talos Principle, which does have DLC, but it's many hours long, or Humble and their bundles and monthlies, or that Lichess and Pokemon Showdown are legitimately completely free.
The Playdate looks like a fun toy, but it's vastly more of a cash grab than the games I play regularly.
Still, I guess there is a niche for this. It just isn’t me.
Nerds with disposable income who will play with it for a few hours, after which it’ll take dust on a shelf.
As a device to plunk down $150 on, no way.
- If the crank is so fun, they didn't manage to show it.
- Hopefully they'll show more games, because the promise of 12 black and white games involving two buttons a crank isn't awe-inspiring.
- The 2DS is the same price and is vastly more powerful and capable. Obviously they're going for simplicity and quirkiness but objectively it's just a real hard sell here.
- Nintendo is rumored to be making a cheaper more portable Switch along with a Switch Pro this year, and I bet that cheap one is going to be $200.
I just think the only "why" of this thing is "because we could." That's totally okay, but I'd be shocked if this was any more than a limited run item, and even more shocked if anything beyond those initial games ever make it to the platform.
I think it's a hilarious idea, and will 100% buy one if I can. I have zero interest in buying a 2DS or Switch though.
Teenage Engineering seem to have a nice little "lifestyle business" producing electronics that most people just go "But why?"
(Also, the crank is demonstrated in the last image is you scroll right down the page. It looks fun!
(I just recently learned about compliant mechanisms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97t7Xj_iBv0)
Like the Bitboy, Pixel Classic, PocketGo, Pocket Sprite. Even the Micro Arcade series which are credit card sized single-game handheld with full color screens.
In that respect, it seems fairly unique to me, if only because it is beautifully designed and polished. It seems like the other options for making your own handheld games are either a bit clunky (eg Adafruit's PyGamers) or require quite a lot of know-how and effort (eg Gameboy or DS homebrew).
I hope that this will result in a bunch of new high-quality indie games. It seems that people are unlikely to invest a lot of effort in making spectacular games for the PyGamer, because the audience is small... Nintendo-handheld homebrew has the potential for a larger audience, but requires so much work that I imagine a lot of potential creators are dissuaded.
I'm on the lookout for a shiny indie-friendly portable that's easy to develop for, because I think that could lead to some exciting new things. Maybe this is it.
That is 12 opportunities to put the gadgets down and focus on the new game.
Each of those are roughly $16 each. It is hard to get through McDees for that sum.
So when it is time, the idea is to set the world aside and have a bit of fun. You may be surprised.
The kids may groove on it, and just trade those times with fast food or something. Maybe an hour or two spent exploring the games, talking about the experience, seeing who likes what, why, etc... with Dads full attention plays better than you might think.
Having said that it looks neat.
Not impossible by any means, but still rather unlikely.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/seven-years-later-the-ouya...
It came with a solar sensor on the cartridge that required the gamer to go outside to charge their solar gun in order to kill vampires. Very cool, but it grew annoying fast.
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/77290/wrc...
Maybe these guys are really into fishing?
I'm curious who is buying this instead of e.g. a GPD XD (full android clamshell with dedicated game controls).
I also don't want to spend my time wading through thousands (maybe millions) of games. The free ones are usually bad, and the good ones come with a ton of ads or in-app purchases. It's just exhausting. I'm still looking for a nice iOS game similar to "Raptor: Call of the Shadows" - just a vertical scrolling game where you can complete levels, upgrade your ship and weapons, beat bosses, etc. I've tried a few different games, but I still haven't been able to find one where I can just pay $20 and own the full game (with no more nagging, advertising, or pay-to-play features.)
I like the idea that they're just going to send a few games, and release one per week. It sounds nice to not have to make any choices, and just enjoy the full curated experience.
I don't know if I'll get one, but those are the reasons why I would consider it. I've also been thinking about a Nintendo Switch, but to be honest I'm not much of a gamer.
There’s much to be said about a handheld gaming device that isn’t constantly distracting you with notifications and alerts. My iPhone constantly teeters between Do Not Disturb and full-on ring volume.
Looking forward to mandatory immersion in the art, story, and gameplay of a dedicated handheld gaming device, a la the original Gameboy.
I'm probably not going to be buying this day 1 but this is very interesting and if anyone can do it Panic can. Best of luck to them!
So I guess the answer is, it's whatever you're used to. Using my right hand for mouse-related tasks was not something I decided on consciously, or due to convenience, since early models (I'm talking C=64 era) did not have the handed designs of today's mice.
The first handheld I've owned was a Greenhouse G&W. I do wish to get back the simplicity and joy of games from that area.
I don't like the language of the page though, e.g.
"we hope you can’t wait to unwrap your gift."
A gift which I've paid $149 to you? My understanding of gift is different than that of Panic I assume.
if the right people get their hands on these (i'm thinking influencers, game critics, but the kind of people who are receptive to new ideas and) and the games are worth playing, it could become a must-have item.
If either of these fail, it will fall into relative obscurity, as these products usually do
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/24/panic-playdate-facebook-...
this is why i love panic, they are independent, creative and have genuine passion for their art... i’d love someday to start a company like that
and playdate, reading that intro page made me genuinely smile, what a cool product idea
Personally I think it would be cool if it had an FPGA on board for offloading and being a bit more consol-esque (=fun) but logically it's probably just a big old ARM core SoC driving the display directly.
Would feel more comfortable if I knew they'd allow people to build and sideload games though.
Aside: this website is very choppy in Chrome on Ubuntu.
From a commercial success standpoint, I'm bearish. Common pitfall in comedy is to make jokes for comedians. This scene has a similar problem where they love to make games for game devs.
Makes me wish I had finished writing my book on making your own video game console!
> Then there's the contemporary modus operandi that gives the console its name. Every Monday, via WiFi, owners receive a new game, the notification light on top of the case blinking to announce its arrival. Whenever you have five spare minutes, you’ll be able to reach into your own shirt pocket, and make time for your Playdate.
After the device is released and is available for sale, a new game will be released for it and downloaded automatically each week for the first 12 weeks, when downloaded a little light will light up and you can have small play date with the Playdate.
I've ranted many a times about the hypercapitalistic race-to-the-bottom approach that Valve/Epic/etc are taking. This is a breath of fresh air and they have my full support.
Some days I think the time of HN has passed because of posts like these being up-voted that much.
EDIT: after a closer look at the page, I realized that they explicitly mentioned partnering with Teenage Engineering on parts of the device design. The website resemblance makes more sense now :)
> By the way, the crank came from our friends at Teenage Engineering. They were our partners for Playdate’s design. Isn’t it nice?
Edit: you took a closer look while I was typing. You're excused. ;)
It's a style that Panic has used for years:
Much like how Teenage Engineering's OP-1 is not competitively priced. This is another example of an insightfully designed, well built product for adults. Older millenials looking for a sentimental package so they can feel like it's their 8th birthday again. They are reunboxing a gameboy color.
Their goal isn't to revitalize the dying, Nintendo/Smartphone dominated scene of handheld gaming. Just a small company releasing a niche product in a low quantity for a low risk profit.
No different than a craft brew or a local farmers market.
In many ways, I think this is the antidote to a lot of the bad behaviors Silicon Valley has developed in the last several years. Sometimes not achieving hyperscale is OK.
Whether or not it's accurate for the OP-1, I think your analysis applies perfectly to the Playdate.
I'm curious though, did someone see this and really want it?
