Playdate delay reschedules the adorable handheld for 2022

(Image credit: Panic)

Playdate, the adorable yellow handheld with a crank, has been delayed to 2022.

Units were originally scheduled to start shipping out later this year, but due to an issue that requires developer Panic to replace the battery in every system, pre-orders will now start going out sometime early next year for the first group of buyers.

Panic explains the situation in-depth here, but essentially the creators found a number of units had faulty batteries that would drain faster than they should've, to the point where some of them wouldn't power on or charge at all. So before shipping any of them out, Panic is sending back the first systems to get a battery replacement and changing the manufacturing process for those to follow.

"This quickly turned into a months-long, all-hands-on-deck research stress-ball, and we halted production at the factory," says Panic's Cabel Sasser. "We made the difficult, expensive call to replace all of our existing batteries with new ones from a totally different battery supplier."

Like pretty much every gaming manufacturer these days, Panic is also getting hit by the supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic. Notably, additional units of the CPU used in current Playdate models won't be available for two years, so Panic is swapping it for a similar version in future units. Panic says this change won't affect how the system operates or how games play.

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.