One of the biggest challenges Panic faced after the Playdate announcement was meeting the demand they created. Within hours of the launch of pre-orders, more than 20,000 consoles were sold in 2021.

The company has announced that it has finally collected all pre-orders for Playdate and completed a long journey that started almost three years ago. This means that the Portland-based company has sold and shipped more than 70,000 devices worldwide.

“It was more challenging than we expected,” explains Panic’s head of special projects, Greg Maletic. “Demand was strong, but it took a long time to get the parts we needed to produce Playdate. COVID certainly played a part in that, and the CPU, in particular, was tricky. But we’re finally caught up now.”

Panic had to postpone the launch of the Playdate after accepting pre-orders to resolve a critical battery issue and replace the device’s processor due to a chip shortage.

“I mentioned the parts shortage, but the CPU was really the trickiest thing that we had to source. And we made the CPU change at around unit 35,000, so roughly halfway through [production]. That was a big software challenge because the CPUs are compatible, but there are always differences that you have to work through. So we spent probably around nine months just making everything run properly on the new CPU,” the company added.

Maletic says that replacing the processor so early in the console’s life was a difficult step and caused a huge internal debate. He adds that he would have preferred to avoid the replacement, but on the other hand, he feels that the transition between the two architectures was quite smooth.

The developer hopes that the company’s new approach to orders – namely, that Panic will send notifications when Playdates are in stock and ready to ship – will reduce the waiting time for the console to a maximum of a few weeks.

The console is available for purchase on the official website, but unfortunately not for Ukraine.