Panic has released sales data for its crank-based handheld, the Playdate, revealing that the console has now sold over 53,000+ units.
According to the statement released to the press, Panic has sold 53,142 Playdates in total since it originally began taking pre-orders on July 29, 2021. This is over double the 20,000 units that Panic initially planned to manufacture, which it at one time believed it might struggle to sell "in a timely fashion". In fact, Panic now claims that it managed to sell all 20,000 of those units in just under 20 minutes, proving just how successful the handheld has been.
Elsewhere in the statement, Panic also gave a bit of an update on preorders. It announced that, to date, it had shipped 27,000 Playdate preorders to customers, with the rest expected to be delivered before the end of this year.
The Playdate Project lead Greg Maletic said in the statement:
“It’s been a great year for Playdate. When we started, we had no idea how big the audience would be for a weird product like this, but we told the factory: build 20,000. To have now sold more than 53,000 (and counting) is heartening. And this, at a time when parts shortages forced our delivery lead-times out as much as a year. As those lead-times shorten and Playdate delivery becomes more immediate, we’re looking forward to an even better Year Two.”
This is obviously great news for Panic, but it is also an encouraging update for developers hard at work creating games and other software for the system. This will likely mean there will be a healthy appetite from customers to check out what they've been working on over the next year or so, at least.
You can preorder your own Playdate directly from its website.