People who get on their high horse and go off about something they know nothing about are the worst.

Why yes, I’m talking about the people complaining about Panic, the Playdate, and Panic’s handling of the Playdate trademark. How’d you guess?

Do I know everything about the situation? Am I a trademark lawyer? Have I read the article in Edge magazine yet? No, no, and not yet.

But I think what really gets me are the people who complain about Panic being a VC-funded company (I don’t think they are? in fact, I’m pretty sure they aren’t), that “Playdate” is a terrible name for a single-player console (you get a new game delivered each week for 12 weeks! in that sense it’s a perfect name!), that Panic is a mean capitalist tech bro company (I’ve used their software for 20 years and, except for “company”, never would have thought to call them any of those) that used the Playdate conference’s timing to force Playdate-the-conference out of the spotlight (I think that’s more Edge magazine’s fault than Panic’s).

As for people saying it shouldn’t have been named Playdate, it’s too generic a term for a video game system, well, what about the Switch? Isn’t that system’s name generic as well?

I can understand why Panic sent an email to Playdate-the-conference letting them know about Playdate-the-game, but can’t understand people upset about Panic trying to do the right thing and work with the conference so it wouldn’t become overshadowed by this new game console. And as for people asking “why didn’t they just rename the console when they learned about Playdate-the-conference?”, everything I’ve seen has the console named and trademarked before they found out the other existed. And how many “big” game companies would even bother to try to look out for others and not just send a cease-and-desist? No good deed goes unpunished, I guess! 😛

I doubt that Panic in general or Cabel specifically would want me to feel like it was my duty to stick up for them, especially when they readily admitted that they could have handled the situation better, but seeing people’s reactions really bothered me. Let’s just say I got a lot of use out of my block button on Twitter today.

Other than a few Twitter interactions I’ve never had anything to do with the people from Panic, but I’ll be disappointed if their seeing people up in arms about this situation is treated as a setback when it sounded like Playdate was supposed to be a celebration of a cool, fun, and otherwise quirky company, especially if I’m led to understand that development began sometime soon after Cabel’s XOXO presentation on how to ensure that the company continues to grow and what it’s like to be anxious about what they should do next. I like Panic, and though I’m not big into video games, I’m looking forward to Playdate.