I'm genuinely curious: do you mean successful as "played a lot" or as "commercially successful"? Do you think Playdate is a viable market for indie devs? Btw it'd also be great to check your games, if you'd like to share some links!
The challenge with Playdate games is that it's a relatively niche market; the number of consoles sold is... probably more than 100K at this point but less than a million (https://x.com/playdate/status/1757478578491732486), of which only a percentage will buy games in addition to the "free" ones.
I suspect any developer whose game gets picked for the "free" games will get a compensation, but I have no idea how much that would be. This link https://x.com/playdate/status/1757478578491732486 suggests that two years ago, all Catalog developers (so not the free games) earned about 500K total / shared amongst each other.
TL;DR: by all means make games for the Playdate but not if you want to make it your livelihood. Personal grumpy take, not based in up to date facts.
