The archive · Games & Play · Product decision · 2024
Balatro turns poker into a roguelike — solo-made, 250k sales in 72 hours
LocalThunk's 2024 Balatro layers Joker multipliers and shop upgrades onto poker hands — a hobby prototype that sold 250,000 copies in 72 hours.
LocalThunk (Balatro)
What it had to solve
Canadian programmer LocalThunk made games as a hobby and showed almost none of them. Balatro began as 'Card Game' based on the Cantonese game Big Two, then absorbed the number-cascade feel of Luck Be A Landlord — yet he deliberately avoided playing Slay the Spire so its design would not be infiltrated by genre conventions.
How it works
Balatro looks like plain poker with pixel art, but it is a roguelike: players score poker hands, spend the winnings in a shop between blinds, and stack Joker cards whose multipliers cascade until a single hand produces millions of points. Pseudonymous solo developer LocalThunk built it in the Löve framework as a hobby, under the working title 'Card Game', and did not plan to make a good game — just to enjoy making one.
Two decisions defined the design. First, he anchored everything in poker hand rankings, a ruleset millions already know, so players could start playing instantly. Second, he deliberately avoided playing the genre's champions — he only touched Slay the Spire months later to check its gamepad code — because, as he told GamesRadar+, 'if I'd played that game before designing this one, it would have infiltrated the design quite a bit'.
The game reached players through a friend who played the prototype for 20–40 hours, then through publisher Playstack. It became 2024's most unlikely breakout: profitable within its first hour on sale, 250,000 copies in 72 hours, and over $4m in mobile revenue by December — while LocalThunk stayed anonymous behind his pseudonym and, by his own account, sometimes regretted the attention that followed.
Why it lands
- Poker hand rankings are a universal on-ramp: no tutorial needed, because the rules are already in players' heads.
- Avoiding rival deckbuilders kept the design original — the developer says genre conventions would have 'infiltrated' his game.
- A single multiplier system (Jokers, tarot, planet cards) gives the game near-infinite combo depth from one simple mechanic.
- The hobby framing lowered the stakes of experimentation: made for fun, not for the market, so the design could stay weird.
- Solo development in a lightweight engine meant the whole game shipped with no team, budget, or publisher interference until after launch.
What it did
Profitable within its first hour on sale; 250,000 copies in 72 hours. By December 2024 mobile sales alone passed $4m, and the game was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards against AAA blockbusters.
What you can take
A familiar ruleset is an on-ramp: reuse a game everyone already knows, then let your own systems multiply it. Deliberately not studying rivals can yield something the genre would never have produced.
Since then
Balatro was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024 and became one of the year's defining indies, with millions of players on Steam, Switch, PlayStation, mobile and Apple Arcade. LocalThunk continued updating it, keeping a notebook of Joker ideas, while saying publicly that the success brought stress and that he might make his next game and never release it.
Sources
- Balatro is the best game of 2024 – its anonymous creator may never release another
- Balatro's creator has barely played other deckbuilders, and thinks that's partly why it succeeded
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card