[Meekro]

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?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/playdate-preview-you-...