Balatro: How a Solo Developer Sold more than 1M Copies in One Month | Hacker News Reader

Balatro: How a Solo Developer Sold more than 1M Copies in One Month

brothers-in-gaming.com

13 pointspipogipo8 comments

The success of this game is amazing. You have AAA developers dropping close to 500M on development and taking a decade just to release a game that isn't fun and doesn't sell well.

Balatro shows it's not money that makes a great game, its vision, passion, and making something fun that makes one.

Isnt it just a gambling simulator/stimulator?

How? Besides the scoring mechanism involving poker hands, and the cards being standard 52 cards, it basically has nothing to do with gambling. It’s a standard press-your-luck roguelite style game.

>How?

Getaway drug to card pack opening addiction/gambling https://balatrogame.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Packs

How is this different from any other roguelite game that has random rewards, sometimes in card form, that also don’t cost anything? This comparison is ridiculous. Because runs are so ephemeral and you don’t actually keep anything, I don’t see how this translates into becoming addicted to opening packs that cost actual money.

Its not random, Balatro specifically portraits photorealistic (as much as possible in its art style) Booster Packs as something desirable and fun to open. I put it on the same level as 12 hour long streams of pato streamers opening pokemon/tcg packs to thousands of children viewers. https://kotaku.com/twitch-streamers-are-opening-90s-pokemon-...

This is just creating younger and younger gamblers. Gambling is bad for society https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/legal-spor...

Random as in randomized rewards. Again, this is an identical mechanism to other rogue lite games. I disagree that this is equivalent to opening real packs of cards. Those have actual value and cost actual money. There is no meaningful time or cost needed to open the packs in Balatro, and each run is separate. It’d be like opening Pokémon cards that you have to throw away after 5 minutes.

Looks like a cool game. I am jealous.

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