[grawprog]

I've gone through the page a bunch of times now, read through the hn comments here and the arstechnica article linked in the top comment. But I'm still having a hard time appreciating this as art or even something non-gimicky and even slightly scammy.

For $179 + shipping you're buying a small underpowered device with a black and white screen, a handcrank analog controller and 24 games. For an extra $29 you can buy a snazzy case and coming soon a stereo mount that's going to be impractical to use while playing so I'm guessing will be for playing music.

The system's closed and going to be reliant on either their SDK or soon to be coming editor. From the sounds of it, there will be ongoing subscription payments for new games.

They're releasing the system without the SDK or editor. On their developer page they have a bunch of vague 'coming soon' promises with no actual timelines or anything. They have no actual plans for any kind of centralized distribution for games.

Overall, it seems like there's a lot of work or even planning that should have been done before starting pre-orders. At this point you're purchasing less than half the advertised features with no real plans as to when they'll be forthcoming.

Just because a well known name is behind a project doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good product or a great idea. Plenty of great people have made lackluster things. Especially in the video game world. A lot of this seems to be more hype because of the people behind the project than the project itself.

[jonny_eh]

> slightly scammy

This is highly offensive to me. Making hardware is hard, everyone here should know that. Here we have a company, with a great reputation, taking a big risk to offer us something different, and people's first reaction is to assume bad intentions?

> Just because a well known name is behind a project doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good product or a great idea

Therefore it's a scam? That is quite some logic there.

[grawprog]

That seems awfully disingenuous. The rest of my post is why i consider it slightly scammy. A lot of buzz with less substance than promised and no actual commitments to the devs they're also advertising too that will inevitably be the ones that support the playdate in the long term.

[yladiz]

A scam is by definition something with malicious intent, something dishonest, and I think that's why the other commenter took offense. It might not live up to the hype, and maybe it'll be lackluster, who knows - no one has played with it yet outside of Panic. But I think it's fair and not disingenuous that the other commenter took a lot of offense to using that word, because by all accounts it doesn't seem to be a scam. I would find a better word that doesn't imply malice.

[Impossible]

It seems like there's a modern definition of scam, especially with gamers, which is hyping or marketing a game too well and not completely delivering on promises (often imagined) due to budget constraints, design or technical challenges and often just inflated expectations. This happens with products that a perfectly fine but aren't what people expect, and products that "work" but are buggy or don't deliver all features immediately.

See all of Peter Molyneux's games post Bullfrog, No Man's Sky at launch, Cyberpunk 2077, Magic Leap. I agree that putting Playdate even in that category because the SDK won't be ready at launch is kind of ridiculous.

[Meekro]

There's another reason this product doesn't fit the category you've described: they haven't spent countless millions on marketing. They just put up a website, and it's not their fault if the gaming press then turned it into the next big thing.

To me, their website comes off as sincere, earnest, and a work-in-progress-- it's kind of like a kickstarter, except with a really great team. They're not setting unreasonable expectations, and readers should be careful not to conflate what they say with what the gaming press says about them.

[jonny_eh]

> it's kind of like a kickstarter

But without taking orders years in advance.

[frakkingcylons]

> For $179 + shipping you're buying a small underpowered device with a black and white screen

They never positioned it as a competitor to a modern portable like the Nintendo Switch so who cares? Do any of those games on the home page look like they need a modern chip?

> They have no actual plans for any kind of centralized distribution for games.

What are you basing that off of? Because they didn't detail the specifics of how the games are going to be distributed?

> Just because a well known name is behind a project doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good product or a great idea.

Indeed, which is why you can wait to buy it until it's out and has been reviewed by others.

[grawprog]

>What are you basing that off of? Because they didn't detail the specifics of how the games are going to be distributed?

https://play.date/dev/

>As for a more official way to distribute them, we’re still exploring different ideas for the best experience of getting games out to Playdate owners.

For a product advertised as a hobby device for devs and gamers, not having a distribution system planned for user made games is not going to help this product thrive.

Things like this tend to be made or broken by the community that builds around them. Look at something like the pico-8. Not exactly the same product, but the markets for them I imagine certainly overlap. The Pico-8 makes distribution of community created content a priority, something that's definitely been instrumental in its success.

Without a community of devs that can support the Playdate and a system they can use to easily distribute content, it's not going to last long.

It seems backwards to try and build a community of devs around a product after it's released. I seem to recall at least one console that died sometime in the 90's for exactly this reason.

[frakkingcylons]

There are already developers working on making games for it:

https://twitter.com/playdate/status/1293636186045480960

[Brendinooo]

>Plenty of great people have made lackluster things

What's something lackluster that Panic has made? They certainly have had misses, but it wasn't because of the quality of the product or attention to detail. They've got a better track record than just about any dev shop.

Here's the original pitch, to give you a sense of what their motives were for making it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190523042100/https://play.date...

[Meekro]

It sounds like your biggest complaint is that there's no clear roadmap for the SDK/devkit that people could use to get into game development, and no clear plans for an app store or some other way for devs to then publish their games. This makes you wonder how they're going to build up their game dev ecosystem.

What I gather from the website is that they're coming at it differently: inviting a hand-picked group of game devs (both experienced and new) and heavily curating their products into weekly releases. Rather than showing players a giant app store that is mostly filled with crap, you get 2-6 high quality games per month that silently show up on your system.

It's a different approach for sure, and to me it's well worth the price to see if they can pull it off.

[ncr100]

It's not a scam.

> For X you get Y.

Scam would be:

> For X you get WILDCARD.

[twohearted]

It's a bundle of 24 high quality games, by talented, diverse and motivated game developers for ~$8 each. And it comes with a free console. Art is worth paying for.

[whywhywhywhy]

>For $179 + shipping

How much should it be?

[xsmasher]

You can buy a handheld that plays all 16-bit games, GBA games, mame, etc. for under $50.

[whywhywhywhy]

What's interesting about that?

Emulating SNES and Genesis games was fun back in 1997 but really are we not tired of that by now?

Just how many times can you go through the emulator dance of downloading all the games then playing each for less than 3 minutes before you give up.

[rOOb85]

> Just how many times can you go through the emulator dance of downloading all the games then playing each for less than 3 minutes before you give up.

What makes this any different?

[stnmtn]

It's all new games made specifically for this platform? What do you mean?

[djur]

How much does it then cost to buy all of those games?

[szatkus]

You can but Nintendo Switch Lite for $200.

[bitbo]

If Playdate uses Sharp Memory Displays, that explains part of the price.

These screens are expensive but also very nice.