Panic Pushes Playdate Shipments Due To Unfulfilling Battery Life, First Increment Now Promised For Early 2022

Although niché hardware comes and goes as time proceeds, Panic plans to leave a lasting impression with the Playdate. Not only is the device come with a crank to play your games, but it also is to ship with an extensive lineup of properties and software as part of its post-launch campaign. Previously the team pressed there will be a fill lineup of titles for Season 1 when the Playdate is delivered.

Additionally, Panic this past July launched pre-orders for the Playdate and those lucky enough to get into the first two groups of 20,000 units will find the hardware to ship sometime in late 2021. As for those that paid later on, promised pre-orders leading up to the 50,000th Playdate will not ship until 2022 the team tells.

However, all projected release windows are now being ushered to a later time frame due to technical setbacks by the internal battery. According to an ‘Playdate’s Owner Update’ email, the batteries that were shipped to the warehouse in California were discovered to be ineffective in holding a charge. Now, the first shipment of devices is aimed for early 2022.

As our first 5,000 finished Playdate units arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we began to test a few of them. We quickly became concerned that some of them weren’t giving us the battery life we expected. Playdate’s battery is designed to last a very long time, and always be ready for you, even if not used for a while. But that was not the case: in fact, we found a number of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn’t power on at all — and couldn’t be charged. That’s a battery worst-case scenario.

This quickly turned into a months-long, all-hands-on-deck research stress-ball, and we halted production at the factory. The conclusion? We made the difficult, expensive decision to replace all of our existing batteries with brand new ones, from a totally different battery supplier.

It was extra frustrating, because when we built our Developer Preview units, the exact same type of batteries worked just fine — but something, somewhere (we’re researching) changed between then and now, and the new ones did not work just fine. We have no time to waste, so we’re moving on. And so, we shipped 5,000 finished Playdates back to Malaysia to be given new batteries. How did that feel? Not great!!!

The good news: we’ve already received the new batteries from the new supplier, and they’re looking really impressive — they’re exactly what we’re hoping for, if not even better than before. We’re extremely confident the new supplier can give Playdate the battery life we designed, and you deserve.

And there’s one huge silver lining: we’re extremely glad that we found this potential issue before shipping you a Playdate. In just a few weeks, factory production will ramp up to full speed again, with new batteries in place. They’ll be put in all units, even those we’ve already made. But, it does mean “Late 2021” units are now “Early 2022”.

Panic goes on to press the long-ongoing chip shortage affecting markets across the globe by revealing it has designated a new CPU to replace the original to meet the demand for the Playdate. “Maybe you’ve heard about the ‘global chip shortage’ everyone’s talking about? We’re here to say it is very real. Covid-19 caused an ever-cascading set of worldwide supply chain failures that are leading to many, many electronic parts being simply… gone.”

Adding, “Here’s one way we’re working to beat the chip shortage: we’ve just finished a revision of Playdate’s main board (for units made later next year) so that we can use a similar, but more widely available, CPU.” Panic also sheds some light on the firmware being improved in anticipation for the new release date paved for the Playdate.

“After some tuning and tweaking, games deliver exactly as we dreamed: you wake up in the morning, and your Playdate is ready with two new games for you to unwrap and play. New game delivery works great and feels great — every time. We really think you’ll agree when your season begins. We’ve also just completed some very complex work on a file system update for Playdate, so Playdate will ship to you with a more robust, journaling file system, to get the most of its 4GB of storage.”

In a similar announcement this week, Valve told its planned late year release for the Steam Deck is also being delayed. The firm tells that the global chip shortage is to also blame for the pushed launch window. You can read the full report by heading here.

Are you patient to wait a few more months for the Playdate’s arrival?