We're contemplating porting our games to iOS and it got us thinking. It should be straight forward making the playdate simulator run on iOS, swipe to crank is already implemented for Mac trackpad. Buttons could be made optional so that crank-only games are full screen with pillar-boxing.
We understand there are issues here around cannibalisation, and potential piracy considerations. But it would also allow Playdate games to reach a huge market. Panic could take some cut of sales from apps made this way.
Alternatively this could simply be a free Playdate app that Panic distributes, which only plays Catalog games via Playdate account. Should be fine under Digital Markets Act.
I was thinking something similar but for Steam instead of iOS.
For example, the Steam Deck has game pad controls. It's going to be a challenge for some games for work with a phone touch screen, for me the main reason I don't play games on mobile.
A Steam app that simulates a Playdate and can run software from the catalog would be quite interesting. I wonder, though, whether fewer Playdates would be shipped, which would be a shame.
I've started a manual port to Steam initially using Flutter, and rendering like an old arcade game with background artwork and some graphics on the cabinet face.
Using the simulator, it might be possible to create some kind of Playdate retro arcade cabinet where you supply the artwork to go around your emulated Playdate game.
Since I haven't released anything yet on Catalog, it's tricky to assess the commercial viability of Playdate games. But a virtually free or very cheap port to another platform could help developers to build a bigger market.
It would make significantly more sense to make a compatibility layer to convert Playdate's API to a more broad library (like SDL3) than to port the simulator, and that is something I've been planning on doing for quite some time.
EDIT: this would be kind of like developing a simulator of your own, except the game/app is just bundled in with the simulator.
