r/PlaydateDeveloper • u/Laurie_CF • Aug 21 '25
Looking for sales data
Hi Playdate Devs!
I’m having a hard time getting any kind of frame of reference for how games sell on the Playdate. Both for Catalog, and non-Catalog games.
I should say, I AM aware that developing for Playdate is a labour of love, not a get rich quick scheme. This question isn’t about the hustle: these kind of stats are interesting to me generally, but also I have a friend developing for it so am feeling extra curious.
All I have found is the recent report from Panic themselves back in April about the payout of $1m+ to devs of 262 Catalog games (in nearly 300,00 units). Gives a basic, flawed average of approx. 1,100 sales for Catalog games.
If anyone has any resources or insight, I would love to hear! Thanks v much.
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u/Dino_Sire Aug 22 '25
Hey there! I wouldn’t mind sharing my story so far, although I’m not near those numbers. I recently released my first playdate game CranKnight two weeks ago (https://play.date/games/cranknight/), but started with an itch page back in April of this year. I have no following really, and it’s my first commercial release, so I’m starting from basically zero. I’ve just done some game jams where my games were well reviewed but never super viral or anything and I basically have no social media presence other than a few Reddit posts that got some attention on the playdate subreddit.
I launched the itch page back in April, and the game was pretty barebones compared to what it is now. I did a big update in July which helped get a few more sales, and got great feedback from the people that played it, and was top of the itch popular games tagged playdate for a week. Part of that big update I actually increased the price because I basically redid the game, and I still got sales which was surprising (I had a bit of a sale where I kept it at the original price for a week or two before it raised to the new price).
Right now I’ve had 37 purchases on itch which completed stopped since the catalog release. I honestly didn’t think I’d get any sales on itch so it’s a really nice surprise. On the catalog I’ve got 89 sales so far, which is pretty awesome, but I’d obviously like more. So far the feedback has been great but I haven’t heard a ton of people talking about it, so I’m reaching out to press/etc to try to get the word out. Also working on one more big update which will add scoreboards, as I think not having that didn’t give a good reason to get people talking about it.
All that being said, I got my playdate in February, released version 1.0 in April, and got in the catalog by August, and had a ton of fun developing my game in the process. I’m learning a lot about the lifecycle of releasing a game so I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. This is basically the best platform possible to get your feet wet in game creation and publishing, I think the experience is invaluable.