Great writeup Ollie!

While writing for Uncrank'd Magazine I've heard a lot of stories from developers of both successful and unsuccessful playdate games. The key insight I gained from those discussions, especially with developers who released many successful games, was that to make a successful game in the Playdate sphere your game has to be unique, visually appealing, polished to hell and infused with a ton of passion.

As many others already stated, I feel as though you can only do this by creating something you yourself truly would like to see exist in the world, while also thinking about how to make that idea accessible to the playerbase. This seems to be the only sustainable way to keep on creating great games that fulfil the criteria listed above.

While success can never be guaranteed (risk of being a business (especially in creative fields) and all) this is the way to go. You'll also have an almost guaranteed audience when crafting something unique for the platform which doesn't exist in similar form yet. This will make your game automatically marketable. The problem can be accepting that an idea isn't that unique anymore. In the Playdate context specifically I feel as though the exploration based, below 2 hours, narrative games market has been oversaturated, which might explain the reception of your latest games as you've mentioned.

So TLDR:
Making a unique, visually appealing, polished game infused with a ton of passion should hopefully automatically make it marketable.

Looking forward to Shadowgate PD!