This is targeted at the HN echo chamber, though. A Nintendo Switch costs less and plays AAA games. This is an STM32 with a black-and-white low rez screen and a hand crank. You could build one yourself for $50. (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3160 but that has a color screen.) Ordinary people that want to play video games are not going to buy this.
I know this verbatim sounds like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." or "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem", both famously wrong assessments of hit products. But in this case, it's different -- the masses already have video games. If you want to make a 320x200 black-and-white game, fire up your editor, open up an OpenGL canvas at that resolution, and start coding. You can have your game available to billions of users tomorrow morning.
They could easily say "we switched from the STM32F4 series to RP2040s because there is actual availability right now" and not alienate a single potential customer.
I'd consider myself deeply steeped in the HN echo chamber. Even though I'm a software guy, I've spent my share of time tinkering with electronics, implementing DIY home automation projects with Raspberry Pis and ESP8266 chips, etc.
But I wouldn't have recognized either of those without going to look up more information, skim the specs or possibly manuals to understand whether or not I care about the change.
The communication from Panic is simple, straight forward, and gives me a bit of context without making me go spend more time on research. They did exactly what they needed to do to help me feel more informed and less frustrated by the change.
On your implication that this is an unnecessary overpriced product, then I suspect this product was not built for you. Sure, someone could purchase those parts and have their own thing up and running in no time. But no one would care.
The PlayDate builds a defacto community all participating in the same product and the hype surrounding it, and this is what people buy into.
I also take issue with this only targeting the HN crowd. There has been plenty of hype in other circles, and the Playdate team will be shipping a no-code project so they're clearly trying to make this accessible to enterprising kids (young and old).
People seem to forget that you can’t evaluate games purely on tech specs. Sure, the graphics will be way better on my Switch. But if I want to play those cute Keita Takahashi or Lucas Pope games, I need to buy a Playdate.
Agreed, and interestingly it’s a similar story for the Switch itself! Relative to a PS5 it’s very underpowered, yet it’s still hugely popular in large part because of the awesome Nintendo games.
> Ordinary people that want to play video games are not going to buy this.
Everyone, including Playdate, knows this. Nobody is thinking this is the next Switch. People who aren't the target audience of the Playdate always seem to think this is the intention and I'm not sure why.
I've said it before, but to me it looks more like a kind of physical Pico8. Again, Pico8 isn't meant for the mass market, but its certainly not useless
