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Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

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Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#291

Post by whywhywhywhy »

larsiusprime wrote: post #178
bullfightonmars wrote: post #63

It would be so awesome if this worked with Pico 8 or a similar fantasy console. I will be much more interested if the barrier to entry for making my own games is as close to zero as possible. 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. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Heard of Pixel Vision 8? https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313

Anyone into this sort of stuff should check out https://androidarts.com/ there are a whole ton of fantasy console concepts on it.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#292

Post by tomaskafka »

chungleong wrote: post #135
justfor1comment wrote: post #59

Isn't $150 expensive? Or may be I am just too poor, to throw money at anyone who asks for it.

It'll probably be worth a lot as a collectible in the future.

Oh, I have some 1st gen Pebbles to sell you then :)).

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#293

Post by seventhtiger »

emdowling wrote: post #215

Not to discount the hardware, which looks absolutely beautiful, but what strikes me the most is the business model. 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 softw…

Seasonality has been achieved in games like Magic the Gathering, League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Path of Exile.

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#294

Post by b5 »

leokennis wrote: post #288
_bxg1 wrote: post #3

I personally love weird single-purpose hardware. Unfortunately it tends not to do very well commercially. Anybody remember this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

This is one of my most prized possessions: http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/v2/

I have several of them, and love each of them. My phone has far more capacity, and could stream effectively unlimited music from Spotify, but there's something unique and special about the Buddha Machine.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#295

Post by arrrg »

alt-enter wrote: post #252
centizen wrote: post #157

Between Panic and Teenage Engineering I actually have faith in this being a worthwhile endeavor. From the face of it I would expect this to go the way of the Ouya, but with those two at the helm it could actually be something cool. It's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnant casual mobile gaming space.

My mind immediately went to Ouya when I read the article, but the concept here seems interesting, and I hope it does better than Ouya did.

It doesn’t have the same goals as the Ouya. The Ouya wanted to be the next big thing, it wanted to be a platform. This wants to be a nice, fun, arty thing and definitely not be a platform. I don’t think it makes much sense to compare the two.

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#296

Post by abrugsch »

PostOnce wrote: post #278
lostmymind66 wrote: post #177

This is going to be a tough sell. $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.

Mobile games: 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…

Also check out the pimoroni kickstarter 32blit then. it's a bit cheaper than the play date (but not by much and at full retail cost will be pretty much the same) but has better scope and will be open source. it's not a Pi-in-a-box-with-retropie but a STM32 microcontroller with a light OS/SDK layer on top. a development toolchain that looks a lot like the editors for Pico-8

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#297

Post by wccrawford »

msvan wrote: post #34
jarfil wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$150 for what looks like 12 simple games isn't that much different.

1) I don't mind paying for games. I just don't want the game mechanics to be designed to divert me towards spending more money on the game. 2) It's 12 games to start with. I'm sure there could be more later on.

They say that the production run will be very limited. Which means there isn't much incentive for gamedevs to make more games later, as the audience can never expand beyond the initial sales.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#298

Post by abrugsch »

nickloewen wrote: post #227
Causality1 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know any of that? There's no photos on the site to indicate how polished it is, no mention of being able to run homebrew on it.

That’s fair, I don’t know for sure (hence “I hope...”). I think shininess is fairly likely, because they are collaborating with Teenage Engineering, who have a reputation for making nice things like the OP-1. Homebrew is much more questionable. On their “media” page they imply that an SDK is forthcoming, but they certaibly don’t make it as clear as I would like. At any rate, the point I was going for was less that I…

pimoroni 32blit may well be everything you described... easy to develop for (LUA or C++, comes with free assets and tutorials) Nicely designed (ok, it's not finely CNC'd aluminium but it looks a lot nicer than most of the chinesium or other indie-cades out there) and open source - they've said the toolchain will run on linux too (I specifically asked)

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#300

Post by winibe4r »

msvan wrote: post #11

I think it's cool. I'm not that old, but games these days mostly seem to be about squeezing every last dollar out of the consumer through shady means. I think this is part of why I don't play video games anymore. It's nice to see something different.

So you think a device trying to make money off nostalgia is different? Nobody would buy this to actually have fun.
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