Playdate devs have earned over $500,000 through Catalog

Playdate developers have collectively earned over $500,000 by selling their titles on the console's Catalog marketplace. Panic shared the news to celebrate the first anniversary of the storefront.

The Playdate maker sold over 150,000 titles via Catalog over the past year, generating precisely $544,290 in gross revenue for developers after taxes, processing fees, and Panic's 25 percent distribution fee.

Playdate owners in the USA, UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan contributed the bulk of those sales. 1,500 purchases were made during the recent Catalog Anniversary Sale, during which the average game price dropped to $4.50 from $5.36. Offering some other interesting tidbits, Panic revealed the average size of catalog titles is currently 5.03MB. The smallest game weighs in at just 30.1KB, while the largest currently stands at 107MB.

53 percent of Playdate owners have made a Catalog purchase

Playdate has sold over 70,000 units worldwide since launching in 2022. Hardware maker Panic has continued to support the handheld in the years since with the launch of Catalog and additional (free) Season One titles.

Catalog currently hosts 181 games and apps but more are being added each month. Panic, however, notes that number isn't indicative of Playdate's complete library, as it doesn't account for the over 800 titles that can be downloaded on third-party platforms like Itch.io.

"38,000 Playdate users, about 53 percent, have made a purchase on Catalog-including downloading the two free games offered by Panic on the store (Reel Steal, Recommendation Dog)," explained Panic in a press release.

"About 32,000 of those users who have not bought a game are still working through the games included in Playdate Season One. With this information, Panic plans to continue finding ways to spread the word about Playdate’s game store to help developers find an audience for their project."

Earlier this year, Panic's head of special projects, Greg Maletic, told Game Developer it's time for Playdate developers to take center stage with hardware production and shipping finally stable.

"It's beyond our wildest dreams in terms of how many developers have embraced it and the quality of the titles that we're seeing," he said at the time. "We want to make sure people know about that and can see what kind of market this has blossomed into."

In our review, we called Playdate an "excitable, accessible, toybox of a machine that strives to empower and captivate creators old and new." You can read that in full right here.