Global Courant 2023-04-18 22:10:10
It has been a year since Panic started shipping the Playdate, its charming handheld console. To mark the occasion, the company has revealed just how many units players have bought to date. Panic says it has sold 53,142 Playdates so far. That’s more than two and a half times the number of units the company initially expected to make.
When Panic opened pre-orders in mid-2021, it wasn’t certain whether it would sell the first batch of 20,000 consoles at a reasonable pace. Eager customers snapped all of those within 20 minutes.
While there is clearly a demand for the console with a crank, getting the Playdate into players’ hands has been a trickier problem. Panic came across a “critical” battery issue while manufacturing the first batch, leading it to switch suppliers and delay the console from late 2021 into 2022.
Not only have parts shortages slowed down deliveries, manufacturing costs forced Panic to increase the price of the Playdate by $20 to $199 earlier this month. Panic has shipped more than 27,000 Playdates and it expects to fulfill all preorders by the end of 2023. After that, it hopes to make Playdate available on an ad-hoc basis and to finally start shipping the Playdate Stereo Dock.
Every Playdate user gets access to a library of 24 games, while there are more than 400 titles available for the console on Itch.io. Panic says almost 40 percent of users have sideloaded at least one game or app. Meanwhile, the company recently rolled out Catalog, a built-in store. So far, users have installed Catalog games and apps more than 19,500 times.
