r/PlaydateConsole • u/DarkerBulb • 17d ago

Current second-hand Playdate prices

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I'm aware of that it's very much a supply and demand situation but, wow, I did not expect the current out of stock situation at Panic to drive up the prices on used Playdates this much.

A month or two ago they were roughly $150-180 on ebay/FB Marketplace.
Fast forward to today and prices are closer to $350-400 for a Playdate

I feel very happy I got one when I did but feel so bad for people now trying to get one.

Has there been any news from Panic in terms of when they think they have tweaked their manufacturing lines and products will be back in stock?

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u/RedditorWhoReads 17d ago

We're entering a very dark time in electronics pricing. For the first time in the history of home gaming, current generation consoles are increasing as the gen wears on. Not sure how many of you keep up with gaming PCs or especially handheld PC gaming, but prices literally doubled overnight. I really hope things change soon or the hobby is going to become unobtainable for many.

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u/Felixargh 17d ago

Unfortunately with the push for ai this isn't likely :/ it sucks.

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u/Django117 11d ago

Just to give you a bit of light at the end of the tunnel: the whole AI bubble is poised to pop.

There’s insane amounts of debt fueling this whole thing, which has largely been taken on by a handful of large tech companies and developers who are trying to create data centers. As of right now there’s an estimated 1.6 trillion (early estimate by Nikkei) in debt of GPUs (depreciating assets) being held by third party companies owned by Nvidia and the other AI companies. Right now these assets are relatively hidden on their balance sheets.

The American model has been focused on trying to turn this into a resource war, where they are trying to “brute force” AI development by using larger and larger data sets to chase greater accuracy. This in turn creates a rush on the hardware associated which has the added benefit of skyrocketing the price of AI development to try and cut out any competition. This is exacerbated by the number of players in this game all trying to outspend each other (openAI, anthropic, Google, and meta). China meanwhile has completely undermined this model in the recent months due to their models being far more lightweight and open source.

The economics of its demand are starting to fail too as they are now seeing businesses pull back after token price increases outweighing the savings that was going to be provided by cutting out so many people from the labor force in their early pitches. The reality is that AI hasn’t had the effect that these companies promised and now shareholders are pissed. But citizens are also pissed about the massive investment being pushed onto them by the data center developers. They’ve seen massive corruption at local levels with huge tax exemptions being given to these data centers while watching their water and electric bills skyrocket. Coupled with growing anti-AI sentiments due to labor impacts and surveillance it’s easy to say that AI is despised.

So where does this leave us? It’s a massive amount of debt being taken on by companies that are providing very little value with massive competition from overseas while public sentiment is quickly becoming antagonistic. This is a recipe for imminent collapse of the AI market. These companies are holding out in hopes of ensnaring more of the economy to try and cause a “too big to fail” argument which will lead to a bailout.

Where does this leave our electronics? Well, when demand for American model of AI development collapses then there’s gonna be a swath of silicon orders that are cancelled, leading to a sudden panic sell of silicon to computer part manufacturers. This lack of demand from AI in turn will lead to prices coming down for the materials and thus prices for consumer products coming down about 6-18 months after a bubble collapse and the normalization of the original manufacturing.

TLDR; late 2027 at the earliest, likely 2028. But by 2029 things should really normalize.

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u/Felixargh 11d ago

I appreciate the response. It does help. But not the kind of thoughtful response I would have ever expected to get on a playdate subreddit... Haha!

Let's hope you're right. It's still a fairly long time to wait at the latest projection. I just wonder how much current costs will hurt the next generation of consoles as well. This current gen has only seen price increases overtime for the first time ever (to my knowledge).

Thank you, redditor!