yeah, pretty interesting insight into some basic marketing. you reduce the price of your products by an average of 86 cents to entice 1,500 new customers.
well with 70k units shipped getting 150k game purchases is absolutely no joke. That said I bought 22 games this sale to basically make my own season 2, so beware of averages here :D
So if we say that 75k Playdate consoles have been sold, it means every user bought around only two games on average.
I bought 32 from the Catalog games until now, and I owned my Playdate 42 days ago. I'm sure many other owners have bought more than 10 games.
In conclusion, there should be many Playdate owners who have never bought any game yet.
Well look at the way this sub talks to new Playdate buyers when there’s a thread asking what games to play: Everyone encourages people to buy a small handful of games and/or not buy anything from Catalog and just ride out season 1 and play free games. The community is not particularly encouraging to deeply explore all that Catalog (let alone itch) has to offer.
And that’s not sour grapes, I’m *thrilled* with how CodeWordPlay has done for me. I poured a lot of time and energy into it as a fun project and have made over $4,000 from it, basically gas money. I’m making several new Playdate games now and have no expectations to make a bunch of money, I just love it and love the scene. But there are some misconceptions I’m seeing in here, I definitely know there are a lot of devs like me who are really happy and enjoying being a part of the dev community.
Because this doesn't include games bought on itch.io, which was the only way to get other games before Catalog, maybe it's a higher average than 2 games overall. Lots of free games out there too. I think I've personally bought 5 games?
I would be curious to know combined sales numbers for the Catalog and Itch! I recall the developer of Life's Too Short showing that they made a comparable amount via Itch in addition to the Catalog. Seems like Itch takes a smaller portion of sales compared to Panic.
Very cool to see transparent stats like this!
It's still hard to imagine many people being able to make a living, but I'm sure some games sold much better than others.
If my crappy math is right, and Panic takes a 25% cut, that means they made about $181k via Catalog. Not we-can-do-anything-now numbers, but not nothing - I'm sure their financial structure is more complex, but that could mean 2 or 3 well-paid employees can be dedicated to the Playdate. Although some of that money is probably going to upfront hardware costs and subsidizing game development.
I'm honestly surprised these numbers are as good as they are. I was an early adopter, worked on a couple of games, but in the end mine just sits on a shelf cause the screen is just so awful. The battle with enough light vs harsh glare, etc brings me back to the old Gameboy days in all the worst ways. It's a shame, too, cause everything else about it is great.
Good thing is that's probably not the case. I've done a sales analysis this winter for Uncrank'd magazine Issue 2 and found out that games from developers which never made a game before and released one on catalog tend to make around 3000$, granted this was where there were only a few games on catalog, but I'd assume most games will land in the roughly 3000$ range with some outliers on both ends of the spectrum of course.
I think this would be true for any other similar marketplace, but playdate users are remarkably generous with their money - probably because they could afford a $200 + tax/shipping niche retro gaming console in the first place.
from hanging out in the discord there's a very positive vibe that everyone wants everyone to succeed and lots are willing to spend to give catalog games a try, which is made easier given they only average like $4 each.
I find the vast swings of responses to this information very amusing haha. Personally, as someone who just submitted a passion project to Catalog, my mind is blown that I might make $2k off it. Obviously not a guarantee, but the on device convenience and the Panic promotion are extremely appealing and well worth the cut they take. Trying not to count my chickens, but considering the size of the platform, I feel like all these numbers are a nice bonus on top of what has been a generally enjoyable experience for me and I'm sure many others.
From the perspective of game developers I believe those are actually disheartening numbers and I’m guessing at least half of those numbers came from the recent sale.
I think games are generally priced too low for the number of playdates sold so far.
I’m also guessing that the season 1 games somehow desincentivize some people from buying Catalog games since within a few weeks they are loaded with games to play on the platform.
So I think it becomes nearly impossible to be a full time developer for the playdate unless you are willing to to put out a game every couple of months to make up for the low price.
And then you have to consider that not every game will have enough quality to make it to the catalog, which immediately limits its sales to an alternative storefront like Itch.io.
It’s insane, for example, that a highly polished game like Mars after Midnight, which took Lucas Pope nearly 2 years of development, is priced at just $6.
Unless Lucas was somehow subsidized by Panic to develop the game, it’s unlikely that he will make a significant return to compensate for the development time and effort.
And that is just the case for the most renowned developer on the platform. Imagine what it must be like for other less known developers.
My understanding is that playdate devs aren't expecting to make a living and already know that it's not realistic to he a full time PD Dev. I believe most are "passion projects." The install base is just too small. The devs have other incentives that aren't strictly profit driven.
To my knowledge, Panic did not subsidize Mars After Midnight, so that price was his choice. He gave an interview that might shed light on his thought process.
>To my knowledge, Panic did not subsidize Mars After Midnight, so that price was his choice. He gave an interview that might shed light on his thought process.
A playdate employee confirmed they didn't subsidize Mars after Midnight
https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1b2ces8/mars_after_midnight_lucas_popes_playdate_game/ksx7ehq/
I've been a professional software developer for one large company or another since 1988... and am looking forward to retirement in about a year.
At that point I may well become a full-time Playdate developer (we'll see how things go ), as I don't have to make a full 'day job' income at it - a welcome supplement to retirement income is just fine. And developing for Playdate is a blast!
Background: I'm the developer of [Under The Tree](https://play.date/games/under-the-tree/), which took approximately 2000 development hours - basically all of my spare time (evenings and weekends) over the past two years, and over 100 artist hours (shout out to [Kumba](http://www.kumbamonster.com/) for the artwork).
Just a datapoint.
Yeah this was never going to be a "full time developer" kinda console, and it's better for it. It's for weirdo enthusiast nerds that like odd creative ideas, like most of us. It's great that people are making a few bucks too (and maybe some good stuff for the resume), even if it's all very niche.
I find it so refreshing that something like this exists. Everything these days has to be monetized and exploited to its last penny.
It’s so nice to be a part of something that’s just being allowed to exist for the fun of it
I do it for fun. Also, Panic basically does a ton of the marketing for us. We didn't sell many copies, but I would have probably sold zero on mobile app stores or Steam.
I’m pretty sure that the devs themselves choose the game prices, not Panic. I think Panic’s only rule for the price is that it needs to be to the full dollar (hence why ‘A joke That’s Worth 99 cents’ had “1 cent DLC”). Not to mention that, just because a game had a lot of dev time doesn’t mean it has to be super expensive, sometimes developers price games lower because that means that more people can play them.
I am surprised by the $544k number, I would have guessed it would be in the $2m range. That said there is also Itch, so the numbers are probably closer to $1m overall. You are right, no one is making a living on making games for this platform if all the devs are competing for a pool of $544k. I’m still working on a game because I just don’t care, I can still make something rewarding in my spare time, money isn’t everything.
I'm pretty sure everyone developing for Playdate is doing so as a passion project and TBQH that is specifically why I buy Playdate games, homebrew Game Boy games, and not games on the Switch store or Google Play store.
> It’s insane, for example, that a highly polished game like Mars after Midnight, which took Lucas Pope nearly 2 years of development, is priced at just $6.
Mars After Midnight is very well-polished, but it's also in some ways more of an extremely charming distraction than a game. I paid the $6 for it, and was pleased with the experience I got from it. But if it cost me any more than that I probably would have been disappointed with how thin and repetitive the gameplay is. If it were priced any higher, I wouldn't have bought it at full price. I would have just waited for a sale.
Which brings to the second point: they've only had one sale event, ever. Without a sale you're only going to sell to the most motivated of customers. Sales are *necessary* to get people who are on the fence to act instead of waiting. That's just normal business and psychology. This is true for basically every industry, not some unique problem to video games. You can overdo it and do some damage by having sales *too* frequently, but periodic sales are where a significant portion of your income is going to come from, and by not having sales you are hurting yourself.
Which if you're going to make any argument for having higher prices it's that: you need to start at a higher price so you have room to mark it down. If you're starting at $1 there's really nowhere meaningful to go with a discount, so you miss out on the benefits that a discount can bring.
Do you think a lot of people know about Panic taking 25% of the money?
I think most people want to pay safely and download the game without using other devices
I release on Catalog, so far exclusively. My game is much more discoverable on Catalog, gets auto-updates, and a chunk of the proceeds go right back to Panic, which in my mind helps to keep the Playdate as a platform viable long-term.
I would love to buy a play date. Been following since the beginning. The fact that is 200 USD and doesn’t have a backlit screen in this day and age is a dealbreaker. Come back once you put a light in it.
Looks like the sale was a very smart idea.
yeah, pretty interesting insight into some basic marketing. you reduce the price of your products by an average of 86 cents to entice 1,500 new customers.
A ton of those sales came from me! 
Damn, really shows how niche this product is.
well with 70k units shipped getting 150k game purchases is absolutely no joke. That said I bought 22 games this sale to basically make my own season 2, so beware of averages here :D
Yeah I STOCKED UP during the sale and will again if they run another.
I also bought a lot on itch before catalog was a thing so that is also still a thing to consider.
Link to the og post: [https://x.com/playdate/status/1781004833136480705](https://x.com/playdate/status/1781004833136480705)
So if we say that 75k Playdate consoles have been sold, it means every user bought around only two games on average. I bought 32 from the Catalog games until now, and I owned my Playdate 42 days ago. I'm sure many other owners have bought more than 10 games. In conclusion, there should be many Playdate owners who have never bought any game yet.
Well look at the way this sub talks to new Playdate buyers when there’s a thread asking what games to play: Everyone encourages people to buy a small handful of games and/or not buy anything from Catalog and just ride out season 1 and play free games. The community is not particularly encouraging to deeply explore all that Catalog (let alone itch) has to offer. And that’s not sour grapes, I’m *thrilled* with how CodeWordPlay has done for me. I poured a lot of time and energy into it as a fun project and have made over $4,000 from it, basically gas money. I’m making several new Playdate games now and have no expectations to make a bunch of money, I just love it and love the scene. But there are some misconceptions I’m seeing in here, I definitely know there are a lot of devs like me who are really happy and enjoying being a part of the dev community.
Because this doesn't include games bought on itch.io, which was the only way to get other games before Catalog, maybe it's a higher average than 2 games overall. Lots of free games out there too. I think I've personally bought 5 games?
Summer Season 2 please 😎☀️⛱️
I made my first purchases during the sale myself! Not to say the games weren't worthy of being purchased at full price, I'm just poor.
I bought two games and I don’t even have a playdate yet 😂
I would be curious to know combined sales numbers for the Catalog and Itch! I recall the developer of Life's Too Short showing that they made a comparable amount via Itch in addition to the Catalog. Seems like Itch takes a smaller portion of sales compared to Panic.
Many of the games are listed for less on itch than they are via the catalog. Even some games that cost a fee via catalog are free on itch.
Very cool to see transparent stats like this! It's still hard to imagine many people being able to make a living, but I'm sure some games sold much better than others. If my crappy math is right, and Panic takes a 25% cut, that means they made about $181k via Catalog. Not we-can-do-anything-now numbers, but not nothing - I'm sure their financial structure is more complex, but that could mean 2 or 3 well-paid employees can be dedicated to the Playdate. Although some of that money is probably going to upfront hardware costs and subsidizing game development.
I'm honestly surprised these numbers are as good as they are. I was an early adopter, worked on a couple of games, but in the end mine just sits on a shelf cause the screen is just so awful. The battle with enough light vs harsh glare, etc brings me back to the old Gameboy days in all the worst ways. It's a shame, too, cause everything else about it is great.
Better than I feared The pessimist in me think that 90% of those sales went to 3 to 5 games...
Good thing is that's probably not the case. I've done a sales analysis this winter for Uncrank'd magazine Issue 2 and found out that games from developers which never made a game before and released one on catalog tend to make around 3000$, granted this was where there were only a few games on catalog, but I'd assume most games will land in the roughly 3000$ range with some outliers on both ends of the spectrum of course.
I think this would be true for any other similar marketplace, but playdate users are remarkably generous with their money - probably because they could afford a $200 + tax/shipping niche retro gaming console in the first place. from hanging out in the discord there's a very positive vibe that everyone wants everyone to succeed and lots are willing to spend to give catalog games a try, which is made easier given they only average like $4 each.
A power law like distribution is going to be the case in any kind of hit driven marketplace I think.
I find the vast swings of responses to this information very amusing haha. Personally, as someone who just submitted a passion project to Catalog, my mind is blown that I might make $2k off it. Obviously not a guarantee, but the on device convenience and the Panic promotion are extremely appealing and well worth the cut they take. Trying not to count my chickens, but considering the size of the platform, I feel like all these numbers are a nice bonus on top of what has been a generally enjoyable experience for me and I'm sure many others.
Hope they edit the map of the UK
From the perspective of game developers I believe those are actually disheartening numbers and I’m guessing at least half of those numbers came from the recent sale. I think games are generally priced too low for the number of playdates sold so far. I’m also guessing that the season 1 games somehow desincentivize some people from buying Catalog games since within a few weeks they are loaded with games to play on the platform. So I think it becomes nearly impossible to be a full time developer for the playdate unless you are willing to to put out a game every couple of months to make up for the low price. And then you have to consider that not every game will have enough quality to make it to the catalog, which immediately limits its sales to an alternative storefront like Itch.io. It’s insane, for example, that a highly polished game like Mars after Midnight, which took Lucas Pope nearly 2 years of development, is priced at just $6. Unless Lucas was somehow subsidized by Panic to develop the game, it’s unlikely that he will make a significant return to compensate for the development time and effort. And that is just the case for the most renowned developer on the platform. Imagine what it must be like for other less known developers.
My understanding is that playdate devs aren't expecting to make a living and already know that it's not realistic to he a full time PD Dev. I believe most are "passion projects." The install base is just too small. The devs have other incentives that aren't strictly profit driven. To my knowledge, Panic did not subsidize Mars After Midnight, so that price was his choice. He gave an interview that might shed light on his thought process.
>To my knowledge, Panic did not subsidize Mars After Midnight, so that price was his choice. He gave an interview that might shed light on his thought process. A playdate employee confirmed they didn't subsidize Mars after Midnight https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1b2ces8/mars_after_midnight_lucas_popes_playdate_game/ksx7ehq/
Is anyone expecting or trying to be a full-time Play date developer? I think most people are doing it for fun and for a unique experience
I've been a professional software developer for one large company or another since 1988... and am looking forward to retirement in about a year. At that point I may well become a full-time Playdate developer (we'll see how things go ), as I don't have to make a full 'day job' income at it - a welcome supplement to retirement income is just fine. And developing for Playdate is a blast! Background: I'm the developer of [Under The Tree](https://play.date/games/under-the-tree/), which took approximately 2000 development hours - basically all of my spare time (evenings and weekends) over the past two years, and over 100 artist hours (shout out to [Kumba](http://www.kumbamonster.com/) for the artwork). Just a datapoint.
Tengo, thanks for sharing. I’m curious, Under the Tree has been out for 4 months now on the catalog, how many copies have been sold so far?
999, exactly, as of this morning (4/21/2024), with 912 folks having it Wishlisted. About 300 of those sales were during the Catalog anniversary sale.
Yeah this was never going to be a "full time developer" kinda console, and it's better for it. It's for weirdo enthusiast nerds that like odd creative ideas, like most of us. It's great that people are making a few bucks too (and maybe some good stuff for the resume), even if it's all very niche.
I find it so refreshing that something like this exists. Everything these days has to be monetized and exploited to its last penny. It’s so nice to be a part of something that’s just being allowed to exist for the fun of it
I do it for fun. Also, Panic basically does a ton of the marketing for us. We didn't sell many copies, but I would have probably sold zero on mobile app stores or Steam.
I’m pretty sure that the devs themselves choose the game prices, not Panic. I think Panic’s only rule for the price is that it needs to be to the full dollar (hence why ‘A joke That’s Worth 99 cents’ had “1 cent DLC”). Not to mention that, just because a game had a lot of dev time doesn’t mean it has to be super expensive, sometimes developers price games lower because that means that more people can play them.
I am surprised by the $544k number, I would have guessed it would be in the $2m range. That said there is also Itch, so the numbers are probably closer to $1m overall. You are right, no one is making a living on making games for this platform if all the devs are competing for a pool of $544k. I’m still working on a game because I just don’t care, I can still make something rewarding in my spare time, money isn’t everything.
I'm pretty sure everyone developing for Playdate is doing so as a passion project and TBQH that is specifically why I buy Playdate games, homebrew Game Boy games, and not games on the Switch store or Google Play store.
> It’s insane, for example, that a highly polished game like Mars after Midnight, which took Lucas Pope nearly 2 years of development, is priced at just $6. Mars After Midnight is very well-polished, but it's also in some ways more of an extremely charming distraction than a game. I paid the $6 for it, and was pleased with the experience I got from it. But if it cost me any more than that I probably would have been disappointed with how thin and repetitive the gameplay is. If it were priced any higher, I wouldn't have bought it at full price. I would have just waited for a sale. Which brings to the second point: they've only had one sale event, ever. Without a sale you're only going to sell to the most motivated of customers. Sales are *necessary* to get people who are on the fence to act instead of waiting. That's just normal business and psychology. This is true for basically every industry, not some unique problem to video games. You can overdo it and do some damage by having sales *too* frequently, but periodic sales are where a significant portion of your income is going to come from, and by not having sales you are hurting yourself. Which if you're going to make any argument for having higher prices it's that: you need to start at a higher price so you have room to mark it down. If you're starting at $1 there's really nowhere meaningful to go with a discount, so you miss out on the benefits that a discount can bring.
So each game on average made 3007$?
Good on Panic to be so open with such figures and I think that $550k is sort of encouraging, this thing is still very niche after all.
Biggest game?
Anyone know which games they are referring to that at the largest and smallest mb in size?
Don't have the time to do this atm, but someone could go check on the catalog website. The file sizes are listed on the store pages.
Maybe if the devs got payed as much as they do on itch, these numbers would be bigger. I personally avoid the catalog and buy from itch when possible.
Do you think a lot of people know about Panic taking 25% of the money? I think most people want to pay safely and download the game without using other devices
I have a game on Catalog and Itch. I sold 1600% more copies on Catalog, due to it being on the console, Panic advertising the drops, etc.
Wouldn't it be nice if your cut on the catalog was the same as itch though?
I release on Catalog, so far exclusively. My game is much more discoverable on Catalog, gets auto-updates, and a chunk of the proceeds go right back to Panic, which in my mind helps to keep the Playdate as a platform viable long-term.
I would love to buy a play date. Been following since the beginning. The fact that is 200 USD and doesn’t have a backlit screen in this day and age is a dealbreaker. Come back once you put a light in it.