To be honest, I’m not big on gaming; have never been. I have owned a couple of gaming devices, right from the hand-held single-game tiny brick of a gadget bought from Trichy’s Burma Bazaar way back in the 1980s to the Atari and Nintendo TV gaming consoles I had while in school. I now watch my son be totally obsessed first with his PSP, then his PS3, and then his PS4… and my daughter totally loves Animal Crossing on her Nintendo Switch.

Even if I don’t relate to gaming as much as the world gives importance to it, I do track that sector out of basic interest and the fact that it is one of the largest chunks of the pop culture and entertainment industry.

So, when Playdate was announced, I was definitely interested to know more.

Panic, a Mac software and game titles producer, announced that they are going to launch a hand-held gaming device (hardware!), for the first time in their corporate history, in 2019.

Since that announcement, the device, Playdate, has tottered owing to assorted issues, including a batch of bad batteries that pushed the launch to 2022. The 2022 batch is already sold and they are now taking pre-orders to be delivered in 2023!

I have read a lot about Playdate. Here is some relevant reading material:
1. The 8-year process behind Playdate’s glorious crank (Polygon)
2. Little, yellow, different. This indie handheld game system breaks lots of rules (Cnet)
3. Playdate console offers pocket-sized gaming, a hand crank and nostalgia (NPR)
4. The Playdate Is Oozing With Charm and Potential (Gizmodo)

It looks incredibly cute, is tiny and handy, and so much has been written about its legendary ‘crank’!

Yes, Playmate has a hardware crank on the side and its use is incorporated in many games. The history of how the crank even made it to the device is fascinating, considering no other gaming device in history has ever had a crank!

But, despite all this interesting background, the one feature of the Playdate that completely blew me away was… wait, hold on to that thought.

---

When we subscribe to a newspaper, we pay once and get it delivered daily. Ditto with magazines.

With radio, we bought the device once and waited for serialized content, week after week, or daily.

TV made daily serials (or serialized content) even more popular.

Newspapers also have weekly columns and sections based on a particular theme or a specific writer.

And now, we have online news outlets like Fifty Two that produce a single piece of long-form content per week. Or The Ken/Morning Context variety that, upon us subscribing, releases one story a day.

On another note, if you hear ‘season’, what comes to your mind? Ideally, it should be the weather-related season, but I totally understand if you said ‘season, as in TV show season 1, 2, etc.?’ 🙂

So, let me get back to the Playdate now.

Playdate costs $179. That’s the cost of the gaming console and 24 games. But you don’t get those 24 games when you get the device!

Instead, you are drip-fed those games: on booting for the first time, the device connects to the wi-fi and downloads 2 games. Then, it downloads 2 new games every week, up to a total of 24 games for the first season!

Do you see what they have done? Panic has combined the anticipation of new, periodic content made familiar by TV + the seasonal approach to content creation made popular by OTT platforms… on a single hardware gaming device!!

The usual gaming console business usually depended on making a device, assorted game developers creating game titles for it, and users buy what they want and play.

The smartphone-based gaming idea added the online store from which we could buy games digitally.

But I don’t recall any other gaming device baking in the weekly release schedule into the hardware.

Of course, Playdate’s games are basic and simple when compared to the complex worlds of Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. This device is for casual gamers. But these tiny games are addictive too, with a lot of imagination lavished into their creation. In fact, Panic makes the creation of games easy by giving its software development kit for free online.

Game developers can freely—without paying licensing fees—create and even distribute their games any way they please. Playdate makes sideloading of games very easy and encourages it too by giving detailed instructions unlike any other gaming console/device company.

So how dramatic is this weekly games release idea? Incredibly.

Think about it.

You pay for a hardware gaming device once, and then the subsequent revenue goes to the game title owners. Sure, the gaming device company gains from the game creators, in assorted ways – license fees, game store fees, fees per sale, and so on.

But Panic’s Playdate idea seems like Apple, in a way they control the user experience via a hardware + software combination.

The excitement in the device is rekindled on a weekly basis since they drip-feed new games periodically as against expecting us to pick whatever game we want, whenever we want. That’s not very different from the Wordle model – only one word per day, wait for the next one tomorrow!

This model requires a longer commitment to the users since Panic’s job isn’t over after convincing buyers to buy the device just once. The weekly games need to hit the mark too, and they need a pipeline of games so that they can deliver on the seasonal promise of periodic releases. And there could be a season 2 that could be unlocked with a fresh games-only fee!

To be sure, from what I read about Playdate, there are many teething issues – the monochromatic screen (a far cry from the smartphones we have been using), no backlight for the screen, basic and simple gaming (compared to the far superior, immersive games in other systems), uncertainty about future seasons (since the commitment for the fee is only one season), and so on.

But more than the hardware (an incredibly unique crank as an input mechanism), the concept of subscription-based hardware is enormously more interesting.

No other gaming company has thought of a subscription-play yet. Imagine what other services that we pay upfront to now can be sold through a subscription model, though with adequate and appropriate tweaks in the system.

For instance, why not reimagine a novel?

So, if we like a certain writer/author, can she/he ask readers to subscribe to their next novel for an upfront fee (I won’t put a number, for the sake of not deviating into arguments for or against that number) that is more than the price of an average novel/book and a commitment that subscribers would get a new chapter every 15 days for 12 months?

And then, once the novel is complete, the full book could also be released in the normal way.

Or consider a music band. Could they ask listeners/fans to subscribe to the next album that would release a new single every month exclusively to them on a secure channel?

Both the author and the band could throw in other extras for the subscriber. A face-to-face group interaction (offline or online) once during the subscription period? Fan merchandise like t-shirts, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, etc.?

Interesting possibilities.

Comments

comments