Playdate Community Census! (2024 edition!)

Hello Playdate Forum Community!

Please take a moment to take part in the unoffical Playdate Community Census.

This is a great way to learn more about who is in our community, how they're using their devices, and what they’d like to see in the future!

This has value for players, developers and perhaps Panic.

Once the survey is over I will release both summary and complete response data for anyone to download and use as they see fit. (The only metadata collected is the submission timestamp, no emails)

Thank you for your time.

(One entry per person. Open for all of July. Responses can be updated)

Update!

The results of the Unofficial Playdate Community Census are now ready for your viewing!

I'm so proud of the artifacts we've created.
This wouldn't be nearly as good as it is without the help of @madvogel
Which is why I give him top billing!
All of the visualizations and insights are the result of his hard work.

Big shout out to the discord community for doing the yards and helping us process the open responses.

You can find links to all of the raw data, long free responses or cleaned up data on the wiki page or on slide 3.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Or come chat about it with us on discord in the census thread.

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Submit'd. Couple thoughts on the form itself:

  • For types of games interested in, one of the options is Local Multiplayer, but I would also have checked Online Multiplayer if it were an option. I'm not aware of multiplayer being a thing at all, so why not shoot for the sky?
  • For other platforms developed for, you've listed Mac, Linux and... "PC". I'll just say that it would be more appropriate to call it Windows if you're talking about Windows.

Hopefully we get lots of participation with this. It would be great to gauge areas of interest in the community.

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Great project!

FWIW, the form requires logging into a Google account. Maybe that's worth it for the benefits, and maybe it's not even optional!

I may be one of only a few people kept out by that. Technically I have a couple Google accounts, but for privacy reasons I prefer not to use them unless really necessary—plus, Google's AI algorithm noticed I bought a new computer recently and considered that suspicious: they locked my accounts, required a password reset... and then said I couldn't do a password reset. No recourse, no support... so I may be out of the Google game whether I like it or not. (Luckily my OLD computer could still get to my GMail, so I was able to change all my logins to no longer use my GMail address.)

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(Now I feel dumb for having sent you a Google Doc earlier... :sweat_smile:)

Won’t let me proceed without a Google account… would it be a hassle to remove this requirement?

Yea there's no way to limit it to one entry per person without it sorry.

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It might be worthwhile to just say "please don't submit it more than once" and remove the requirement.

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No google account requirement, please.

Hey team, sorry about the google requirement but it's going to need to stay.
Thankfully, we've had some great pick up on the Unofficial Playdate Community Census.

It closes in 10 days so be sure to fill it in so we can get the best data possible!

concur on removing google.

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Hey team, sorry about the google requirement but it's going to need to stay.

Not to be too snarky about this, but it seems pretty clear that the community consensus is that the Google account requirement is a deal-breaker to filling out the questionnaire. I'd be hesitant to draw any conclusions from submitted forms knowing that the sample represents some other demographic.

Hey @GuyPerfect

I've been really grateful for the response the census has received from the Playdate community at large. I've already had a number of devs already reach out to me wanting to get results early.

What's been really interesting to me is that this forum is the only area of the of the community has given me anti google feedback.

You're right that any dataset is skewed by the way data is captured but I didn't find a better platform to preform the census with.

My requirements were...

  • Free or very cheap
  • Easy to use for all involved
  • Other box support
  • Matrix style question types
  • Conditional branching
  • One response per person

To get one response per person, you need to authenticate someone (Cookies don't really work). And I don't think people are willing to sign up for a new service to fill in a community survey. So using some sort of SSO service is needed.

If I was to do this again next year, is there another service you can recommend I check out?

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This may be anecdotal, but I think the dev forum is a very small fraction of the entire Playdate community. The survey was also posted on the community discord, subreddit, and Twitter, which from what I saw had pretty high engagement :man_shrugging:t2:

I did it on discord. But do we need to limit it to 1 per. how many bad actors are there?

Well, this is the development forum. Maybe folks who twiddle bits and/or push packets for a living have some insight into how the figurative sausage is made and prefer to opt out? Just sayin' :wink: .

Where are the results for this posted?

Hey @nanobot567

A developer and data scientist from discord is helping me process the results for people to enjoy. I’m currently recovering from sickness and he’s just gotten sick. We’ve started working but need a bit more time :slight_smile: :blush:

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Just so that you are aware, I submitted multiple forms using different Google accounts.

@GuyPerfect Why would you do that though?

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It's one thing to not want to be tracked, and so not participate.

It's another to poison the well.

This is why we can't have nice things.

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