The Creoqode Lyra+ was supposed to be a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display, built-in game controllers, and a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 at its heart. But less than two months after launching a Kickstarter crowfunding campaign for the device, Creoqode has announced it’s cancelling the crowdfunding campaign and scrapping plans to release the Lyra+.
According to the company, the decision was made in response to “the unexpected increase in material costs,” which would have made it impossible to deliver the Lyra+ to customers for the prices Creoquode had originally promised.
When the campaign first launched, crowdfunding prices started at £299 ($365), and the goal was to eventually charge £459 ($560) for retail versions of the handheld. But Creoqode says that the rising costs of materials made those plans unfeasible. And rather than increase the price of the Lyra+, the company decided to cancel it altogether.
That’s not too surprising given that folks were already complaining that the Lyra+ was too expensive even before any sort of price hike. But according to BackerKit, the crowdfunding campaign was going reasonably well before it was cancelled: Creoquode had set a goal of £10,000 but had already raised more than £53,000 from 142 backers in the first 29 days of the campaign (although the vast majority of those pledges came in the first few days).
The Lyra+ would havefeatiired a 7 inch QLED IPS touchscreen display, a 6,000 mAh battery, stereo speakers, USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI ports pllus a headet jack, integrated game controllers, and a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a 1.5 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0and a microSD card reader for upgradeable storage.
While it wouldn’t have been the fastest gaming PC around, folks have been using Raspberry Pi hardware for emulation for ages. It has plenty of horsepower for playing classic console games on the go, and Creoqode also positioned the Lyra+ as a solution for game streaming.
‘…the decision was made in response to “the unexpected increase in material costs…”’
It’s called INFLATION! The solution is to print an unlimited amount of money and pump into the economy – amirite? Ummm, wait… no. That CAUSES more inflation! Never mind, let’s do it anyway and say it works. Eventually the economy will collapse – which was really the goal all along.
You crash the money value, then you buy the countries assets at fire salvage price.
I’m surprised they had that many backers. This thing was overpriced by almost 300%.
This thing would have been outperformed by other ARM powered handhelds that cost a fraction of this its price.
Vastly over priced and vastly underpowered. Good riddance to junk.
Hopefully the backers get their money back.
Well, I think in some ways it’s better to quit while you’re ahead and know you can’t pull something off than to keep dragging your customers along and make them all look bad, which certain other product campaigns I could name have done.
If they’re still looking for something to do, maybe they could redirect their efforts to making a CM4 carrier board that can serve as the main board for a Framework laptop. Someone at Frame.work mentioned they’d be willing to work with somebody interested in doing something like that in a forum post a year ago.
That’s a great idea! Opening up the framework eco-system to include a whole range of component options would make it much more compelling.