It’s been a pretty big year for entertainment with many a blockbuster and big-budget release hitting the headlines. At the box office, two films broke $1 billion, including a new record for an animated film, and Dune: Part Two hit the big screen to net a cool $708 million worldwide. On TV, we got the excellent one-shot of Shōgun and an equally excellent DC show in the form of The Penguin.
In the world of video gaming, there were, of course, many triple-A releases, with some of the best being Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade, Astro Bot, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Yet, above all else, one indie game from a solo developer made it their year. That game was Balatro, which was released in February and has already sold over 3.5 million copies across all platforms – including on mobile, where it costs $9.99.
The story of the little indie rising to prominence never fails to capture the gaming audience, but what’s special about Balatro is how it masterfully riffed on a classic game that just about everyone knows. It’s an innovative form of product development, and a case study that people in all lines of development should take into consideration.
Keeping What People Love
The developer of Balatro, LocalThunk, developed a game that’s as accessible as the classic card game of poker while also having a bold additional twist to gamify it for modern video game players. At its core, this is very much a game of poker. Your aim is to make high-scoring poker hands from a hand randomly dealt to you from the deck, getting a set number of hands and discards to get to a score and advance to the next round.
Essentially, if you understand the rules of poker, or even just the winning hand combinations, you’ll get how to play Balatro. Texas hold’em itself is only as popular as it is because it’s so accessible and encourages you to use skill to win. It takes a lot to know when you should fold, up the bet, and work out how likely a card you need is to come out of the deck next.
It’s this core element of a playing card game – the randomness of the draw and the need to use key decision-making to try to improve your standing before making a big play – that makes poker so popular and, likewise, Balatro. The developer homed in on the intrinsically entertaining element of poker and then gamified the formula a touch.
Adding a Bold Twist
Balatro toys with the formula of poker by letting you use winnings from each round to buy Jokers, Planets, and Tarot cards – all of which augment your scoring ability – and the chance to buy different cards for your deck. It makes for an incredibly varied experience, and one that’s different on every run. Plus, if you fail to get the score required in a round, you have to start over again, putting your fate back in the randomness.
Importantly, even with these additions and twists sounding so foreign to the game of poker on paper, they share a very similar trait: they’re simple. If you get a Planet card, you get more points for getting its associated winning hand. If you get a Joker, whenever you play cards or hands associated with that Joker, you get a boost. After a round or two, Balatro is clear-cut enough that it almost becomes instinctual to play.
The innovation of Balatro boils down to keeping the key elements of what’s popular and making additions that follow the same ideals, in this case, straightforward, random-powered gameplay. An innovative product knows what made its predecessor good and then builds on it in a creative way.
