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> Who is this built for?

I don't know, but it seems buying a standard console would get you more games and less e-waste.



I’m a bit shocked at the price! It’s the same price I recently paid for a switch lite. I don’t understand how it can be so expensive.


Economies of scale. Nintendo has decades of hardware expertise, industry weight, and manufactures several orders of magnitude more units.

I think the price is pretty fair for a neat, boutique thing.


Also Nintendo make more money from the games than the consoles.


Check what Aliexpress has to offer for 1/10th of the price... Even with games, it seems very expensive...


If you want to spend 30 bucks to play 8 billion different choices of quarter eaters on a glorified MAME piracy emulator that will probably also burn your house down from a battery fire, go for it. Don't forget the renters insurance.

If looking at raw CPU speed is what makes a console fun for you, and creativity doesn't matter at all, this is clearly not your platform. Some of us have different metrics for what makes game platforms fun that aren't just it costs less than a 24 pack of pepsi, 8000 choices of softcore pornography mahjong games, and how many polygons you can throw on a screen while cooking an egg on the graphics card.

The Alibaba consoles are just straight up creativity death - their business model is to bottom feed what tiny value remains out of old games they didn't make. Their long term accomplishment, should society be awful enough to let them solely succeed, will be the death of any ability to make new games or innovate in any way, leaving the entire non-Nintendo industry to just bottom feed compete with each other on slightly cheaper consoles in an eventual race to the bottom, while Nintendo releases the 600th version of Mario Kart, because it's easier and safer for them to copy than to innovate.

Playdate has a real chance to inject some creativity, competition, and openness to the platform world, and there's nothing especially novel about that to anyone that has read the history of computing and knows what games like Spacewar did. These kinds of "novelties" have a way of changing everything in ways nobody can really understand at the time.


> I don’t understand how it can be so expensive.

CNC milled novelty crank.




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