We looked at Balatro's pre-launch campaign, its successful launch strategy, and discuss what the near future holds for one of the most successful indies of the year.
We believe everyone who clicked on this article knows about Balatro. If that is not the case, in a few words Balatro can be summarized as a roguelike deck-building game that combines elements of traditional deck-building games, such as Slay the Spire, with poker-like features. In Balatro, players collect cards to build powerful decks and engage in strategic combat against a series of eight unknown enemies, called Ante.
If you would like to read more about the rules of Balatro, check the appendix, where you will find a short intro to the game and its functionalities.
But what’s new about another roguelike game? Here’s how Balatro innovates in its own genre:
Adapt rather than plan: In most deck-building games, it's easy for players to plan and execute their desired strategies. In Balatro, every run is different in that cards awarded or available to buy during a run are always random, and the deck heavily depends on that. Also the various enemies that you face are very different from run to run. This random factors force the players to adapt their strategies on the fly, encouraging improvisation rather than long-term planning.
Comedic and Poker-like meta design: many of Balatro's cards and mechanics are designed to be funny or satirical. For example, cards may reference game mechanics themselves or have exaggerated, over-the-top effects. This meta-design creates a lighter, more playful experience that contrasts sharply with the often serious, tactical focus of other roguelikes.
Other than in-game characteristics, Balatro has been heavily covered by the press for another big reason: it was able to sell over 1M copies in less than one month, something already impressive by itself, but even more knowing that it has been developed by a single developer, localthunk.
In this article we explore three phases of Balatro’s life cycle (pre-launch, launch, and post-launch) and give our view on how the game has worked incredibly well in the short-term, reaching great results, but now everyone is waiting for more of Balatro - we will see if localthunk delivers!
If we want to synthesize the article in a few sentences, this is what you’ll find:
Pre-launch: thanks to a strong appeal with streamers, plus a focused Steam strategy, Balatro has been able to target the right audience in a way that normally indie games are not able to replicate
Launch: thanks to its easy-to-understand gameplay, its quick onboarding, and clear, achievable goals, Balatro has gained much from word-of-mouth in the few weeks after launch, which allowed the game to sold more than a 1M copies in a month
Post-launch: in opposition to what we see as a normal behavior for a roguelike (Slay the Spire, Hades (pre Hades 2 launch), Binding of Isaac, Spelunky 2 for example), Balatro’s average concurrent player metric is rapidly declining. What does this tell? That while in the short-run the game is incredibly appealing, players do not stick with it as much as with other roguelike games. We give our take on it.
Jump to a specific chapter here:
Pre-launch Strategy: streamers, demos, and publisher support for a winning formula
Balatro built its pre-launch strategy around four main areas:
Involving streamers to promote the game
Launching multiple demos over time to let players try the game
Participating in Steam Next Fest (multiple times)
Cultivating an active Discord community
In this article we will focus on the first three points, mostly for lack of strong data on the Discord topic. We still believe that Discord played an important role in the overall success of the game but with what we have, it's difficult to measure. Let us know if you think there's a way to estimate that with publicly available data.
To measure the impact of each of these strategies, we looked at Balatro’s Steam Followers numbers and studied its behavior pre-launch (full chart at the beginning of this chapter). Other than the cumulative value of followers, we used the week-over-week (WoW - no, it's not for Word of Warcraft for this article) increase in followers as the proxy metric to measure the impact of an event in during a specific week.
Let's now focus only on the pre-launch phase and see what events really mattered in terms of increase in followers on Steam. The game was released on 02/20/2024 (apologies readers from outside the US, dates are in the US convention in this article), so the graph below shows only the data until the week before launch:
The event that started it all is Northerlion's first stream of Balatro on July 19th 2023. Before that, basically no one knew about Balatro, but that stream increased the followers by almost 400%! Interestingly enough, Playstack, Balatro's publisher, started working on Balatro right after that (https://playstack.com/demo-out-now-balatro/) and we think they had a big role in shaping the next steps of Balatro’s pre-launch strategy.
Something that made us realize how much streamers had an impact on Balatro's successful launch is the difference in impact between the first and the second demo. The first demo, launched in June 2023 before any sort of stream and with no ads whatsoever had barely no impact at all, while the second one in September 2023 was a huge success, as can be seen from the chart above. We think the second demo was very successful not because it was much better than the first demo by itself, but because in between that time, Playstack and streamers really worked hard on letting players know about Balatro. The launch of the new demo version also aligned very well with Steam Next Fest in October 2023, and the two events are very difficult to discern from one another this time. So it's difficult to attribute the success to only one of them.
From the conversation, it might seem that whatever stream-related stuff can work to promote a game. But were all streaming-related marketing events successful for Balatro? Clearly no. For example, the heavily marketed “Jimbo's Invitational", which was basically a live Balatro tournament with some noticeable influencers, doesn’t seem to have had a big impact on followers. In our opinion, people are enticed when they discover more about a game, understand its gameplay, and why it is fun and worth buying it. Something more difficult to convey with a tournament or any other high profile marketing campaigns, like ads and trailers. This is why we think that that didn't work as well as some other tactics. If you look at Northerlion's first stream of Balatro, it is a very basic run-through of the game, which showed in a really easy and direct way why Balatro is fun. That's what we think players are looking for in streams about new games.
The last big jump in Steam followers happened during the Steam Next Fest in February 2024, which run at a perfect moment- just two weeks before release -, giving Balatro the last big push (+20% week-over-week increase in followers).
By looking at Balatro's numbers alone without any comparison doesn't tell the whole story, though. Are these numbers good? How do they compare with other indie games?
To give a clearer picture, we have compared Balatro's pre-launch behavior to another acclaimed indie game that launched recently, Animal Well (AW, which launched on 05/09/2024). How's AW chart? Very boring, see below.
Two interesting things about the comparison:
AW reached 10k Steam followers during week's launch, exactly like Balatro
Balatro had a much stronger and longer tail of WoW increase in followers after launch. Balatro reached 40k followers after less than two months from the release date, while it took almost 4 months for AW. This means that momentum and word-of-mouth for Balatro were much stronger. As an additional data point, WoW increase in followers for Balatro was still over 10% two months after release, while Animal Well was at 8% already two weeks after launch.
Let's see now in more details what happened pre-launch for AW.
The only big spike is streaming-related. On 01/09/2024, YouTube content creator "Dunkey" announced that BigMode, his publishing label, was going to publish AW. Other than this, there is basically nothing to mention about AW's pre-launch strategy. Although the two games reached the same amount of followers on Steam at release date (around 10k as mentioned above), the overall success in terms of number of sold copies is very different.
We know that Balatro has sold over 1M copies during its first month (and 2M copies in less than six months), while estimations for Animal Well are around less than 500k after ~4 months. This basically means that Balatro's conversion numbers from follower to buyer are much much higher than AW's ones.
Note that this doesn't say anything about the quality of the two games, but only that how you market your indie game really matters. The main two reasons why we think that Balatro's conversion from follower to buyer has been much more effective are:
Balatro was able to build a “high-quality” group of interested players. They were not merely following the game on Steam, most of them had already decided to buy the game and we think this is due to the very well crafted marketing strategy that we discussed above.
Word-of-mouth helped Balatro incredibly – people recommended it to friends and other players, propagating the successful launch strategy for a long time after release.
The first point can be explained by the analysis that we just concluded. What about the second point? Why has Balatro benefitted from a big word-of-mouth success?
Let’s see in the next chapter, as we think that is directly linked to its gameplay.
Launch: how Balatro immediately hooks up players and makes them excited
Now that players have bought the game, it’s time to keep them engaged and have fun with it. This second chapter focuses on the reasons why we think that Balatro is a success in this matter, which also helped it's successful word-of-mouth expansion.
These are in our opinion the main three reasons why Balatro has seen a very successful release launch:
It leverages a very cool poker theme, without asking the players to actually be knowledgeable about poker
It introduces a super quick and effective onboarding to let players enjoy the full experience as soon as possible
It shows players a clear and tangible winning condition to beat the game as soon as they start playing
Poker-related, but poker independent
Balatro is described as a “poker roguelike” and the game takes clear inspiration from poker, but what players need to know about it is almost nothing. This incredibly lowers the barrier to start playing the game. The only thing to know about poker would be the value of poker hands, but Balatro has made that quickly accessible from anywhere in the game by clicking a single button, which pop-ups a cheat sheet showing all the available poker hands and their scores.
Generally speaking, choosing poker as the theme for the game was very smart and brought a fresh air to a genre that is very heavy on other settings and color palettes.
Someone could argue that the choice was made to draw people’s attention with the gambling aspect of poker, but it was really funny for us to read that localthunk has a completely different (and we might say extreme) perspective on gambling: “Balatro Creator Hates the Thought of Their Game Being Sold to a Casino Enough to Forbid It in Their Will”.
Easy onboarding
Another piece of Balatro's success is the onboarding sequence. If you haven't played it or don't remember how it is when playing the game for the first time, this is a video that you might check if interested.
To guide the players at the beginning of the game, the developer uses a text Joker companion called Jimbo, which explains the game's basic rules. After that, without further ado, the game throws the players directly into the first run of the game. From that point on, the player is basically able to experiment and play in whichever way they want.
Some elements of the game aren’t fully explained anywhere, but more than a miss, we believe that it is more of a design choice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, but overall we think that this choice does fit the game, instead of having a much more structured and detailed onboarding which could take 5-10 mins.
Players have already paid for the game and because Balatro's gameplay is deeply additive (in a good way), it was smart from the designer to throw the players directly into the game and let them learn by doing.
Spoiler here! An example of this lack of information is that the order in which you place your joker cards, matters. This is because joker cards can add or multiply your scoring value at the end of the playing hand and that means that addition should be done first and multiplication last. This rule (although mathematically obvious) is never explained in the game and can make the game a lot easier once you take it into account.
Was it intentional? Maybe.
The Winning Condition
In roguelike games, it's usually difficult to draw the line and define the game’s ending.
But in Balatro we think that the developer has made a very good job in presenting a clear winning condition to the players: to beat Ante 8.
In games like Hades, the players have basically no clues of how long and how they will be able to beat the game (in Hades you can guess that it revolves around defeating Hades himself, but it's difficult to imagine how and when that will happen), but in Balatro you know from the start that you need to reach and beat Ante 8 and that does not look like an impossible task. The players feel that as something tangible. We think this was a good choice since it seems like the good balance between a challenge and something that is clear and achievable, which encouraged players to keep playing and investing time in improving their skills.
There’s no complicated challenges or alternative routes that the game is asking to complete in order to win and, the more the player plays the game and understands the rules, the more they feel confident in being able to beat it.
Does the game really end at Ante 8?
As we have already stated previously in the article, defining a clear ending in a roguelike game is hard.
From what we described so far, it might look like Balatro lacks depth of content, but that is not the case.
After beating Ante 8 for the first time, there are still many things to do, which are especially appealing to "completionist" players:
Play with a different Standard Deck: there are different (16 in total) Standard Decks that the player can start a run with, and most of them need to be unlocked first. Picking a different deck doesn't actually mean that the player starts with different cards (as you would probably expect), but that some conditions/rules of the game are changed instead. For example, starting with a Blue deck increases the hands that a player can play every round by 1, while the Black deck has an extra joker slot, but at the same time the player can play fewer hands each round. This is the main extension of the game and it is interesting because the player is pushed to change strategy and find new ways to beat the final Ante
Play with Challenge Decks: probably our favorite extra mode in Balatro. Challenges are in the form of 20 Challenge Decks, each one with with an unusual set of cards that forces the player to play in specific ways. This is interesting because players can't use common tactics that might always work with Standard Decks
Tweak the stakes: stakes are debuffs for the players, which basically make the matches more difficult and thus these options increase the replayability of each Decks
Get the highest score: after beating Ante 8, players can keep to increase their highest score ever. It's really weird that there isn't a leaderboard, it would be easy to add one in our opinion!
Get all the achievements: as with any other kind of game, Balatro has achievements, too. There are some very difficult achievements to complete, you can check them in the appendix if you’re curious.
Post-launch: how Balatro keeps players engaged
We clearly think that Balatro has been able to win players in the short-term and enjoyed incredible success.
But we also think that in the mid-term, the game could have done much better. Why? Let's see some competitors' data.
We compared the average concurrency of players on Steam for three roguelike games between March and August 2024: Binding of Isaac, Balatro, Slay the Spire (STS). Hades could have also been included, but because of the recent launch of Hades 2, we excluded it from the comparison. If you go and take a look at Hades before the launch of Hades 2, you will see a similar behavior, although being this before Balatro's launch, we preferred to exclude it to eliminate potential seasonality factors. We also checked Spelunky 2 and although the magnitude of concurrent players is much lower than these other roguelikes (so we could not add this game to the same graph), the behavior is very similar, with 2+ years of very steady number of concurrent players between 2022 and 2024.
Looking at the graph above, the main takeaway is that both Binding of Isaac and STS have enjoyed a very constant number of concurrent players for a long time. We aligned the graph to Balatro's release date, but you can easily go to previous dates and see that this steadiness has been there for a very long time for this games. On the other hand, Balatro has seen an evident decline over time. While this might be expected during the first few months after launch, it should have been settled down by now, but the overall trend is still downward.
We quickly checked the numbers after the release of the mobile version of the game to see if there has been any impact, but the trend has not changed at all.
Moreover, given of much Balatro has sold in its first six months since release (more than 2M copies), we expected a much higher concurrency rate - for example, STS sold 1.5M copies in the first two years and unofficial numbers estimate a total of 5M copies sold (on all platforms, including mobile) as of today.
So, why do we think that Balatro is not as sticky as these other roguelike games? Here our take.
The randomness factor
Balatro relies heavily on randomness and unpredictability. While these features provide a fresh and entertaining experience initially, they may not offer the depth and long-term strategic complexity that keeps players engaged with other roguelikes over extended period of times. Games like STS and Hades have deeply layered mechanics, where mastery and optimization provide long-term satisfaction. For example, STS has different characters to play with, and each of them requires the player to 1) understand how they work to exploit their full power, 2) and change the way you play depending on the character and adapt to their strengths.
Balatro has much simpler mechanics, which definitely allow for an easier player onboarding and initial hook but, as we’re saying, make more difficult to keep the players engaged. After knowing that the jokers’ order matter, and understanding how to best invest the money during your runs, we think that it is mostly a matter of randomness and luck, elements you obviously can’t control, to beat the game. And this is something that kills part of the excitement of strategizing and carrying out the planned tactics, pushing away a specific audience of roguelike players.
Content Longevity and Replayability
Successful roguelikes like STS and Hades maintain player interest through high replayability, offering a deep variety of mechanics, characters, and strategies that evolve over time. Players often return to these games to explore new builds, optimize runs, or challenge themselves with harder difficulty modes. Balatro may lack the same level of mechanical diversity and depth in its replayability. Let's see some more detailed examples.
Lack of Challenge or Skill Progression: games like STS and Hades have a strong sense of skill progression, where players feel rewarded for mastering the game’s systems and developing better strategies over time. In contrast, Balatro’s reliance on randomness and improvisation may reduce the sense of mastery and progression, making the game feel less rewarding for players who seek a challenge or a steady increase in difficulty. GMTK did an amazing job in this video to explain how Balatro exploits fake hidden information as a mean to make the game fun.
Casual vs. Hardcore Audience: Balatro’s humor and lighthearted nature might appeal more to casual players, who tend to play in short bursts and move on to other games. On the other hand, STS and Hades have attracted a more dedicated, hardcore audience that invests significant time into mastering the games. The more casual appeal of Balatro could explain why its player base declines faster, as casual players tend to move on more quickly than hardcore roguelike fans who stick with games for the long haul.
Conclusions and the future of Balatro
There is still a lot of stuff coming for Balatro, and we're excited to see how the game will keep evolving. We already know that:
There will be a big 2025 update. Balatro will get a major gameplay-related free update in 2025. Localthunk already released a small update in which he added new content to improve replayability, but there hasn't been much more in the first six months after launch. One thing that we would bet on as an addition for the next update is the daily/weekly challenge. Many roguelike games have this and we think it would be a simple nice addition to keep player even more engaged.
Cross-overs. There are already many collaborations/cross-overs with other prominent games happening (Dave The Diver, The Witcher 3, Among Us, and Vampire Survivors so far). We don't think that there is a lot to discuss here, these are nice things for the players to engage with while they don't really bring new players in and won’t improve retention either.
Balatro Mobile (this section was written before Balatro mobile release and hasn't been modified). That a mobile version of Balatro was in development was known for a long time, and finally an Android/iOS version of the game has been released on September 26th 2024 for $9.99. STS adopted a similar approach some years ago, but that didn't really resonate with the mobile audience. Looking at some numbers, STS mobile has reached 500k downloads and $3.2M revenue in over 3 years, which casts doubts about the financial sense of that port.
It is true that the mobile version of STS was launched during COVID, which was a deterrent to the Android/iOS version, since interested players had 24/7 access to their PCs at home, but it also shows that it did not attract many new players. We expect something similar for Balatro: it’s not a mystery that mobile premium games do not perform well (here an insightful interview to thatgamecompany's co-founder Jenova Chen on developing Sky: Children of the Light). Apparently, Balatro has reached $500k in revenue during the first five days, which means it has sold around 70k copies on mobile so far. We will see how it goes, but we would have hoped for a different approach (including a cross-compatibility with the PC/console version of the game). We think that Balatro is a game with a perfect fit for F2P mechanics. It would be (relatively) easy to add an in-game currency and use it to get new decks, unlock challenges, spend on consumables and/or unlock new Jokers. We understand localthunk's stance on gambling, but we also think F2P doesn’t necessarily mean gambling. But this is a discussion for another time.
Thanks for reading, and we look forward to feedback and questions!
Appendix
In this section you will find a quick summary of Balatro's rules and a high level analysis of its game design.
The Game Loop
The rules of Balatro are simple: you must defeat your enemy (Blinds and Ante) by playing poker hands and scoring chips. Each poker hand gives the player a certain amount of chips, based on two factors:
Poker hand rarity (for example, a four-of-a-kind will score higher chips and multiplier when compared to a two-of-a-kind)
The Joker card (Jokers) the player has
When defeating a Blind, the player earns money that can be spent in the shop before starting the match against the following Blind or Ante to buy Jokers or Consumables, which will help the player improve the deck.
Below we deep-dive into the key concepts of the game, that are: poker hands, consumables, jokers, the shop, tags, stakes, and decks.
Poker Hands
Poker hands are an element that has been taken from the poker game. Depending on the combination of cards that the player decides to play, and on the rarity of achieving that poker hand, they provide a score.
Consumables
The consumables are split in 3 categories:
Tarot Cards
Planet Cards
Spectral Cards
The first ones are really varied. They can modify the cards in the deck, improve them, or even generate new Jokers or tarot cards.
Examples are:
The Fool: creates the last Tarot or Planet card used during this run
The Hermit: doubles money
Strength: increases rank of up to 2 selected cards by 1
The Devil: enhances 1 selected card into a Gold Card
The Planet Cards instead simply improve the “power” of a poker hand, increasing the chips and the multiplier scored.
Spectral Cards are really similar to Tarot Cards. The difference compared to them is that they provide a much greater modification to the cards and the deck, at the cost of a negative effect.
Examples are:
Wraith: Creates a random Rare Joker (must have room), but sets money to $0.
Black Hole: Upgrades every poker hand (including secret hands not yet discovered) by one level
Jokers
The Jokers are surely the main twist added to the game. Why? Because the Jokers heavily influence the run and the players' playstyle.
Here are two examples of a common and rare joker
Greedy joker: Played cards with Diamond suit give +3 multiplayer when scored
Wee joker: This Joker gains +8 Chips when each played 2 is scored
As you can see, they change a lot the strategy of the player: in the first case a player might be encouraged to add to the deck and play diamond suit cards while, in the second case, they will add to the deck and play more 2 cards.
This also allows for interesting build and synergies, one of the reasons why it’s fun to keep playing the game.
The shop
This is the place where players can spend their money to buy Jokers, Consumables, Booster packs or Vouchers
Booster packs
There are different types of booster packs, and each of them provides different cards.
Arcana packs, contain Tarot Cards
Buffoon packs, contain Joker Cards
Celestial packs, contain Planet Cards
Spectral packs, contain Spectral Cards
Standard packs, contain playing cards that are added into your deck
Vouchers
These cards, found in the shop, refresh or restock only after defeating the boss Blind of each Ante.
They change different aspects of the game when compared to the previously quoted types of cards.
Examples will make it easier to understand probably:
Paint brush: +1 hand size
Planet merchant: Planet cards appear 2X more frequently in the shop
Telescope: Celestial Packs always contain the Planet card for your most played poker hand
Tags
The tags are benefits that you get when skipping a Small or Large Blind before the boss Blind. This is an interesting risk-reward choice for the player. By skipping the blinds, the player is renouncing the hypothetical money they could earn from that play, money that they could spend in the shop.
But sometimes the tags are worth taking the risk, depending also on the strategy of the run.
Examples of tags are:
Double: Gives a copy of the next Tag selected (excluding Double Tags)
Boss: Re-rolls the next Boss Blind
Rare: The next shop will have a free Rare Joker.
Replayability: Decks, Stakes, and Challenges
There are different ways to make the game last longer.
The player has the possibility to pick a different starting deck (they are 16 decks in total) at the start of a run. Each deck has its own characteristics, making each run pretty different. There are various ways to customize the run: changing Standard Deck, using Stakes, or using a Challenge Deck.
Standard Deck
Picking a different standard deck, most of the time, doesn’t provide different cards, as you would expect, but changes some other elements of the game.
For example:
Blue deck: +1 hand every round
Black deck: +1 joker slot, -1 hand every round
Abandoned deck: no face cards inside
This allows the player to play the next runs with a more interesting challenge and encourages them to try new different strategies.
Also, to give a sense of progression, the decks are unlocked by doing specific actions such as discovering items or winning a run with a specific deck.
Stakes
While the different decks provide both a challenge but also encourage new strategies, the stakes are simple debuffs for the player, making the runs more difficult. There are 8 in total, some examples are:
Red Stake: Small Blind gives no reward money
Green Stake: Required score scales faster for each Ante
Blue Stake: -1 Discard
Challenge Decks
The challenges are my favorite “active” way to increase the longevity of the game (they are 20 in total).
In contrast to what I said about Standard Decks, Challenge Decks provide new decks with usually an unusual set of cards and they force the player to have certain jokers. This is an even stronger way to force the player to play in specific ways. We recommend to go here to check some examples, in case you are curious.
UX: Visual and Sound Feedback
Like some other recent gaming hits, Balatro’s visuals take advantage of players’ nostalgic feelings by using retro visuals. This, alongside the psychedelic style, results in Balatro having a strong and recognizable artistic style.
Moreover, the game is full of VFX (Visual Effects) and SFX (Sound Effects) for every action, making each of them interesting to the player when executing them, and never getting bored.
One interesting element is the soundtrack. It’s made up of 5 tracks that share a common background theme, but then each of them presents a different take on the theme. You might think that 5 tracks (which last less than 20 minutes in total) might be too short for a game that players are supposed to play for a long time, but we didn't think that.
In its simplicity and with its funky vibes, the soundtrack does the job. Looking online, a lot of players praise it and say that they listened to it for hours and hours.
In the end, we think that the Game Design of Balatro is pretty smart and, once again, a solo indie game developer managed to produce a hit-game.
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