About

Balatro is a deckbuilding rogue-like video game based on playing creative and illegal poker hands to progress. After its release in February 2024, the game saw a fanbase grow swiftly through word of mouth.

History

Balatro was developed by LocalThunk and published by Playstack.^[1] LocalThunk published the first trailer for Balatro to YouTube on June 11th, 2023, gaining 15,000 views in eight months (shown below, left). On January 25th, 2024, Game Trailers published a release date trailer for the game, gaining over 32,000 views in one month (shown below, right). The game was released on February 20th, 2024 on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.

In Balatro, players attempt to win a poker-like game, though the rules are quite different than poker. Instead, traditional poker hands come with scores and multipliers that lead up to a point total, and the hand with the higher point total wins. Furthermore, the game has various other cards such as jokers that can increase scores even further.^[2]

Online Presence

The game scored solidly among critics, earning an 88/100 on Metacritic as of February 26th, 2024.^[3] However, much of its success was through word of mouth and its Steam community. As of February 26th, the game has an "overwhelmingly positive" Steam score^[4] based on 8,200 reviews. This made several gaming publications take notice of it, including Screenrant,^[5] GamesHub^[6] and Game Rant.^[7] Within 72 hours of release, the game sold 250,000 copies.^[8]

The game was also streamed by prominent streamers Ludwig and Vinesauce Vinny within days of release (shown below).

Since its creation on June 27th, 2023, the Balatro subreddit^[9] has gained over 10,000 subscribers.

Search Interest

External References