Steve Troughton-Smith"As of April 2026, [ @playdate's ] Catalog will no longer accept titles that use “Generative AI” for art, audio, music, text, or dialog."
What tiny bit of interest I had in Playdate development just evaporated, but they know their audience 🤷♂️. I would hope this isn't an app-submission quality-control problem masquerading as policy stance; other platforms like Steam, and events like Ludum Dare, tried going down this route too, and backed down as the world changed around them. The irony is that one of the reasons Playdate exists IIRC is because they feared a world where Apple says what they could/couldn't make. The turns have tabled
leah szpunar@stroughtonsmith fwiw you can still sell/distribute games on other platforms like itch.io, and the sideloading process is incredibly easy (can just go to the website and upload the game file and then it downloads on device)
@saige that may be technically true, but if the platform is saying 'developer, you're not welcome', I'm not going to go out of my way to circumvent that, you know?
@stroughtonsmith fair, although the vibe ive always gotten is that the catalog is meant to be like, really curated and so most stuff is distributed outside of it (but also i could be wrong here, i haent done much with my playdate yet cause ive been so busy and i havent looked at catalog stuff in a while)
@saige oh for sure, to the audience of high-quality indie game devs to which the platform caters, this is probably the right policy. But it *is* an exclusionary policy, so some groups of developers will be excluded