There's plenty going on in the scene! Panic themselves are still concentrating on getting through the preorders, but they're also soon launching Catalog which is going to be the official storefront for non-season games. Currently itch.io is the defacto place for sideloaded games and there are
410 games tagged "playdate".
The Playdate Community Awards show was a really well put together event from December which did a great job of highlighting some of the best games from the Playdate's first year. I got asked to be one of the judges and it was very cool to be involved!
Tiny Yellow Machine has just started a Playdate news show too, the summary is in the description and gives an idea to what's going on in the scene:
In a similar vein there is a podcast called
Hello Playdate that highlights new releases. There's an
official podcast too which has been concentrating more on the season one games and devs.
jawa_ wrote:Hey, Orange, I think you've had the Playdate for about six months now... what is your verdict from a hardware perspective? Perhaps there are aspects you really like? Any things you're maybe not so keen on or that could be improved?
I'm impressed with the hardware overall! It feels suitably premium. The screen and the crank are the two most notable aspects of it and both are great - the screen is super crisp while the crank feels solid with a satisfying amount of resistance. The console has crashed on me a few times but nothing that wasn't easily fixed. I don't have much else to say really - it's an oddball handheld and I'm down with that! Having a backlight would be an obvious improvement but it's not a dealbreaker for me.