$400,000 worth of Playdate game consoles disappear in Las Vegas, hardware maker says
Plus: Impassioned speeches, Star Wars endgame stats, Spider-Man doubts, publishers' top three priorities and more GDC ‘24 highlights
No one at Panic, the company behind the Playdate console, knows exactly what happened to two pallets stacked with $400,000 worth of the palm-sized portable. But the circumstances around their recent disappearance in Las Vegas certainly sound suspicious.
“It’s a bit of a true crime drama,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser said at the Game Developers Conference last Friday.
Sasser was holding court during a rousing panel near the end of the week-long event. His presentation covered the ups and downs of Panic’s first console, the $200 square handheld with a monochrome screen, yellow buttons and a crank.
Panic had faced early skepticism from the public after it announced the Playdate in 2019, but sold out of its pre-orders in 17 minutes in 2021. The Playdate was nearly ruined when its launch units arrived from their factory all with faulty batteries, forcing repairs that delayed launch from 2021 to 2022. Since then, the Playdate was dropped by its shipping company (but Panic found a new one), got dropped by its factory (they’re switching to a new one) yet has managed to sell 70,000 units and now runs a variety of excellent games.
And then there were those missing pallets with piles of Playdates. Panic has been trying to track them down over the past couple of weeks.
“We checked up on our inventory levels and it was a little bit short,” Sasser said. “We contacted the shipping center, and they're like, ‘Yeah, weird. These pallets–—FedEx said they were delivered, but we have no trace of them. But another thing that you might want to know that's weird is, two weeks, after your pallets went missing, two other pallets were delivered by FedEx to the construction site next door instead of our shipping warehouse.
“And they sent an amazing picture of two pallets of Playdates just sitting where they're building a Circle K in North Las Vegas.”
“The person that signed for the two pallets that they recovered was the same person that signed for the two pallets that [they] have yet to recover,” Sasser said. “So there's a lot of research happening right now.
“Now, keep in mind we know the serial numbers of every unit, so we know exactly what serial numbers are missing. Seven of them have been registered to people that live in North Las Vegas.”
“So anyways, I'll keep you posted—or legally not keep you posted—depending on where this goes,” he said.
Throughout his GDC talk, Sasser shared Panic’s Playdate woes with good humor. It was all worth it, he said.
He showed fan mail the company had received, letters from kids excited about the Playdate, and a message posted online from someone who said the platform enabled them to finally realize their dream of making a video game.
Most people are good, he concluded, and things tend to work out. He said this with confidence, even as he spent several minutes detailing how he outfoxed a scammer who tried to get a Playdate early by faking a terminal cancer diagnosis.
“This has been just the experience and the journey of a lifetime for me,” Sasser said. I'm really glad I got to be a part of this.”
More Playdate
Is it profitable? Sasser: “Nope! Well… we’ve been running the numbers a lot, and Playdate actually makes respectable amounts of money. But the challenge we have right now is that there are a lot of people assigned to the project.” The company plans to move some people to other projects. (Panic also makes Mac apps and publishes games such as Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game and the upcoming Time Flies.) “It can definitely be a profitable enterprise,” Sasser said of the Playdate. “That's our goal for this year.”
What happened to the long-delayed stereo dock? The Playdate add-on was announced in 2021, which was “way too early,” Sasser acknowledged. He said the core reason for the delay was a reliance on Panic’s factory partner to write the device’s software. “We have since purchased the source code to the software, just to give you a hint to where we're at. So I'm excited to finish that thing up and get it out the door.”
Item 2: More things I heard at GDC
“I think awards themselves are political statements, so it's hard to separate that,” Venba’s lead designer, Abhi, told me, after he used part of his Independent Games Festival Awards acceptance speech at GDC calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In the speech, he also criticized GDC for being too expensive for many of the attendees who’d most value it.
Venba is an acclaimed narrative cooking game about a South Indian immigrant couple living in Canada, “I think Venba is a deeply political game,” he told me. “So it makes sense that anything I would have to say about it would also be political.”
Venba had been nominated for other recent awards shows but hadn’t won. But Abhi was ready. “The Palestinian ceasefire has been part of every speech,” he said. “This is the first time I got to say it.”
Abhi’s speech was one of several during the IGF and GDC awards in which presenters and recipients made big statements critical of the industry or calling attention to global crises.
December’s The Game Awards was void of any such statements, and November’s Golden Joysticks had prohibited them, according to a presenter who bowed out in response. But no one was holding back at GDC, it seemed.Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke would make a real-time strategy game, if he had all the time in the world. He told me this backstage at the GDC Awards after filling a page of my notebook with terms to describe his studio’s latest hit, Baldur’s Gate III.
Vincke and Larian are known for major role-playing games, but what genre of game would he make if time was infinite and he could do something else? “Maybe a first-person shooter?” I un-seriously suggested.
“Ultima Underworld and System Shock were some of my favorite games,” he replied, naming two first-person all-timers. “But I [wouldn’t] touch it because I would have to learn everything again to be able to make it. A lot of people are doing that better than me.
“I really like strategy games—turn-based strategy games, real-time strategy games—so I think the first thing I would do, if it’s not an RPG, would be an RTS. I think the world needs a good RTS. And if not, then I would make a roguelike. But certainly the world doesn’t need more roguelikes!”
70% of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor players kept playing the game after its credits rolled, in order to experience more of the game’s voluminous side content. And the “majority of those for multiple hours,” according to narrative designer Cole Swany.
Swany and Jedi: Survivor senior writer Cheyenne Pualani Morrin gave an hour-long GDC talk about the 2023 game’s elaborate but largely optional cantina, explaining the massive effort that went into writing dialogue for a diverse cast of intergalactic gamblers, laborers, explorers and scoundrels: 18 non-player characters in the cantina, collectively speaking over 5,000 lines of fully-recorded voice-over dialogue, much of which is triggered as the player advances the game’s main plot or side stories. There are 100s of interactions that players might miss if they don’t revisit the cantina as they play, the writers explained. The cantina changes over time, across about 17 world states, depending on what’s happened in the game.The word for “gameplay” in Arabic is اسلوب اللعب (“osloob al-laab”). That’s according to Fawzi Mesmar, the veteran game designer and current vice president of editorial at Ubisoft, who I chatted with after he received his GDC ambassador award.
Mesmar wrote the first Arabic-language game design textbook and had to figure out how to translate key game design terms into the language. اسلوب اللعب “translates roughly to ‘the method of play,’” Mesmar said, “Because if you just say ‘gameplay’ and translate that directly, it wouldn't make sense.”
Mesmar also told me that he is “disgustingly optimistic” about the future of gaming, despite the recent reams of layoffs, worries about big budgets, and studio closures. Why? “Just seeing the games that are out there, seeing the nominees, seeing the student games. So much incredible talent is coming into this industry, making so many amazing games, that we’ll recover.”The Godot gaming engine doubled its user base in a month last fall, after executives in charge of Unity, one of the big two game-making engines, announced an unpopular new plan for charging game developers every time players installed their games (Unity later largely rolled it back).
I learned this while waiting on the sidewalk, when I was recognized by Adam Scott, a programmer at the Godot Foundation, which supports the free, open-source engine. Before the Unity fiasco, Godot usage was taking about a year to double, he told me. I asked Scott if he sent now-former Unity CEO John Riccitiello a thank-you card. He laughed.The incredible, near-instant fast-travel system in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was briefly on the chopping block during the game’s development. Insomniac Games design director Josue Benavidez revealed that in a talk about how the studio improved open-world exploration in its latest Spider-Man game.
The problem with the fast-travel was that, in testing, it exacerbated the tendency for players to ignore much of what was happening in the game’s virtual New York City. Players prioritized expediently getting to the next mission marker on the game’s map, instead of focusing on the virtual world Insomniac was building. “It was so detrimental to the experience that we actually, at one time, had to consider cutting the fast travel feature or delaying the unlock until after the player ended the game,” Benavidez said.
But the developers realized that their game’s exploration loop needed improving They preserved the fast travel, still offered it to players early, but worked to keep players more engaged with the game world so they wouldn’t feel tempted to always use it. Insomniac’s solutions included making side quest mission markers visible in the game world from far away and making those “markers” manifest in the city in the form of, for example, glowing or sand-covered rooftops—the kind of indicators that a player would enjoy spotting by swinging through the in-game city.Bungie’s internal planning schedule document for Destiny 2’s ongoing post-release expansions, seasons and patches gets about 80 hits per work day internally, or about 62,600 lifetime, according to Bungie technical program manager Shawna Williams. She gave a GDC talk about how to manage a game that is constantly running, constantly expanding, and constantly at risk of bugs, without burning the staff out. To deal with the ever-present possibility of bugs in the live game, the studio has triage meetings twice a day. Bungie employs about two dozen “release marshals” who work on seasonal or expansion content and then drive live-game triage until the next season is released.
Because a problem in a live game can crop up at any minute of the day, Bungie policy is that anyone in the company can report a live game emergency. “The process is blameless and no one is going to get in trouble for doing so,” Williams said. If a report comes in during traditional off-hours, a member of the studio’s leadership is paged so they can determine if an emergency fix is needed or if discussion can at least wait until the next twice-daily triage meeting. Severity of issues is determined based on potential impact on the company’s business.Game publishers are looking for safer bets these days and are focusing on 1) sequels, 2) licensed games and 3) remakes/remasters, more so than 4) new intellectual property, according to Brad Hendricks, CEO of Blind Squirrel Games. “I think that particular tier right now is really tiny,” he told me during an interview at GDC. “A lot of the publishers are focusing on those top three things right now. And most of our meetings have exposed that as being true.”
Companies cut back on projects in recent years as the post-pandemic-lockdown gaming boom subsided, Hendricks told me. Studios like his that spend a lot of time on contract work, at times doing co-development rather than leading their own projects, are “just trying to make sure we get through this period.”
“Every time we're in a meeting, everyone's saying, ‘We’ve got to figure this out. We're thinking about this now: What are we going to do in ‘25, ‘26, ‘27?” he said. “The previous two years, it was sort of: ‘How do I cut costs?”
Blind Squirrel employs about 130 game makers, led development of 2016’s BioShock collection, handled engineering for 2021’s Mass Effect Legendary Edition, develops creatures and environment for Amazon’s New World, is doing engineering work on future Amazon releases and is developing its own upcoming game tied to a major IP.
The studio works across all consoles, which Hendricks described as being near “the end of the tail.” Console transitions used to be harder on studios that would have to opt between developing for the old generation of devices or the new ones, he said, giving extra work to companies like Blind Squirrel if they needed to make separate versions. “I don't see that being a problem in the future,” he said, adding that he “assumes” all three next-gen consoles, as with the PS5 and the Xbox Series in the current generation, will be backwards compatible.
Item 3: In brief…
📉 Take-Two’s stock fell 5.2% on Monday, following a Friday report from Kotaku that Grand Theft Auto VI might slip from 2025 to 2026.
😲 The Elder Scrolls VI currently has “playable builds,” Bethesda mentioned in a post commemorating the series’ 30th anniversary. The game was announced in 2018 but is still a long ways off.
🗓 PAX East will be held in May next year, a shift from the February/March/April timeframe for the Boston-based public-facing gaming convention. This year’s event had overlapped with the Game Developers Conference, requiring game makers who had reason to attend the industry event in San Francisco and the public expo in Boston to fly cross-country mid-week.
💰 Capcom is increasing the number of “Art of Metamorphosis” items sold for in-game money in the recently released Dragon’s Dogma 2 to 99 in a forthcoming patch to the game, VGC reports.
Capcom’s new game has been slammed with negative user reviews, especially on PC, from players incensed that some scarce in-game items including the Art of Metamorphosis, are also being sold for real money via microtransactions for a game that already costs $70.
On PC, modders have created tools to make those items abundant in-game and avoid any pressure to pay any extra dollars, Eurogamer reports.)