Panic is celebrating Playdate’s second birthday this month, and among the perks of the party are some sobering statistics on sales of Catalog games.
History of the game entered the market With 24 free games in April 2022. Its Catalog store launched in March 2023, offering 16 select games for purchase directly on the device. Panic has added more titles to its catalog every two weeks over the past year, and today there are 181 games and apps on the market. The catalog has sold more than 150,000 games and generated $544,290 in gross revenue for developers — after taxes, processing fees and Panic’s 25 percent cut.
The average price of a Playdate Catalog game is $5.36. The average installation size is 5.03 MB, the smallest Directory game is 30.1 KB, and the largest is 107 MB. Playdate is equipped with 4 GB of flash memory. It also has 16GB of RAM, an accelerometer, a 400 x 240 1-bit display, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, a mono speaker, a condenser microphone, and a stereo headphone jack. Oh, and it has a delicious little crank.
The numbers Panic shared today include Catalog purchases, meaning they only tell part of the story. Although there are less than 200 titles in the catalog, there are more than 800 Playdate games and apps available. on itch.io alone, and there the community is active and alive. As I described in our Retrospective gaming history Looking at the device’s itch.io page , posted last week, it feels like “walking through a friendly underground clubhouse populated by fun video game enthusiasts.” But in a great way.
Playdate supports games from new and veteran developers and includes some of its most notable titles Mars after midnight by Lucas Pope, Cranky’s Time Travel Adventure uvula from Keita Takahashi’s studio and Zipper By Bennett Foddy. Here are some of my personal favorites Root bear, Spellcorked, A journey of words, Copter Copter and Pocket Pets.
This is the first time Panic has publicly shared information about Playdate game sales or its revenue share model. The 25 percent cut Panic takes is less than standard Assigned by Steamwhich gets 30 percent of most game sales, but that’s more than split Epic Games StoreReserves 12 percent for Epic.
The Playdate costs $199 and has an optional blue cover for $30. Panic has also been teasing the Stereo Dock, which features a cute Playdate charging station, Bluetooth speaker and pen holder, for more than two years, but the accessory is still “coming soon.” There’s no word on pricing or a release window for the Stereo Dock, but recently Playdate Project Lead Greg Maletic This was reported by Engadget expect an update in the coming months.
“Apologies to everyone with Playdate who has been patiently waiting for the Stereo Dock; it’s been a more challenging project than we anticipated and we’ve had a few false starts,” Maletic said. “We thought we’d save some time on this project by having our factory handle the software for the Stereo Dock, but we’ve learned that in some cases you always want it. The Stereo Dock is very much alive, and we have physical prototypes to prove it, later this year we are waiting for an official update on when you can buy it.
According to Panic, more than 70,000 Playdates have been sold in the past two years, and just over half of all owners bought a Catalog game.
