Balatro: How a Hobby Poker Game Became Indie Gaming's Biggest Solo Story

The only money LocalThunk planned to spend on Balatro went to a musician he found on Fiverr. Everything else (the code, the cards, the shimmering CRT glow, the joker named Jimbo) he made himself, in his spare time, in Saskatchewan, Canada. He wanted a nice project to put on his résumé.

Instead, Balatro launched on 20 February 2024, grossed more than $1 million in its first eight hours, sold over a million copies in a month and, by January 2025, passed 5 million. At The Game Awards 2024 it won Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game and Best Mobile Game, and became the first game made by a solo developer ever nominated for Game of the Year. Almost two years on, it remains the clearest proof that one person with a good idea can still beat the whole industry to the punch.

A game built for friends

Development started in 2021, about two and a half years before release, as one of several small games LocalThunk made for people he knew. His first idea was an online version of Big Two, the Cantonese card game. Then he watched the streamer Northernlion play Luck Be a Landlord, a slot-machine roguelike, and the pieces moved. Why not a single-player roguelike built on poker hands?

The rules are simple to learn. You play poker hands to score chips against a target. Between rounds you buy Jokers, cards that bend the rules: double your score for every heart, reward you for playing fewer cards, turn a weak pair into a monster. The game is about finding combinations the designer never planned, and it is very good at making you feel clever right before it humbles you.

He had barely played other deckbuilders. LocalThunk has said he only tried Slay the Spire, the genre's defining hit, near the end of development. He also does not play poker, and has said he does not want Balatro used for gambling.

Under the hood, Balatro is written in Lua using LÖVE, a free and lightweight framework that hobbyists love and big studios almost never use. There was no engine licence, no art team and no marketing department, which kept the whole project small enough for one person to hold in his head. The soundtrack, a woozy loop that fans can hum on command, was made by LouisF, a freelance musician hired in March 2023.

About a year before launch, LocalThunk quit his day job to finish the game. He still treated it as a side project. Nobody, including him, expected what came next.

How a publisher found it on Steam

The turning point came from a cold message. Patrick Johnson, head of discovery at the UK publisher Playstack, found the game's Steam page and contacted LocalThunk on Twitter. Playstack signed it and built a launch around public betas and big streamers, precisely the audience that had inspired the game in the first place.

It worked spectacularly. Balatro launched on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch on the same day, reached macOS on 1 March 2024, and arrived on Android and iOS on 26 September 2024. The phone versions alone grossed $1 million in their first week and $4.4 million within two months, and about half of the first 5 million copies were sold after the mobile launch. A separate edition, Balatro+, went to Apple Arcade, and a Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on 25 February 2026.

The awards season nobody saw coming

Balatro's trophy shelf would be impressive for a big-budget studio:

• The Game Awards 2024: Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game, Best Mobile Game; nominated for Game of the Year and Best Game Direction.
• Game Developers Choice Awards: Game of the Year, Best Debut, Best Design, Innovation Award.
• D.I.C.E. Awards: Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game, Mobile Game of the Year, Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year.
• BAFTA Games Awards: Debut Game.
• Golden Joystick Awards 2024: Best Indie Game and Breakthrough.
• Apple Design Award for Delight and Fun.

LocalThunk stayed anonymous throughout. Playstack staff accepted trophies on his behalf, and at the BAFTAs the award was collected for him by actor Ben Starr.

Friends of Jimbo

One more reason Balatro stayed in the conversation: it became a meeting place for other games. Four free Friends of Jimbo updates between August 2024 and February 2025 swapped the face cards for characters from other series, including The Witcher 3, Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, Stardew Valley, Cyberpunk 2077, Slay the Spire, Civilization VII and Fallout. It is unusual to see blockbusters lining up to appear in a solo developer's card game, and it tells you how much goodwill Balatro built.

There is a neat loop in all this. Balatro exists partly because a streamer showed its creator a roguelike; it then became one of the most streamed games of its year, which in turn put other small roguelikes in front of millions of viewers. In 2024 and 2025, a good chunk of the indie scene's conversation ran through one jester's poker table.

Then there is the update everyone is waiting for. A major content update planned for 2025 was moved into 2026, because LocalThunk wanted development to stay a hobby and avoid crunch. In February 2026 he said it was still in progress.

By the numbers

• ~2.5 years: development time, starting in 2021.
• 8 hours: time to pass $1 million in gross revenue.
• 1 month: time to pass 1 million copies.
• 5 million+: copies sold by January 2025, not counting Apple Arcade players.
• 3: Game Awards won in one night.

What other solo developers can learn

It is tempting to read Balatro as a lottery ticket. Look closer and there are lessons that travel:

• A familiar hook. Everyone knows what a flush is. Balatro needs no tutorial for its first five minutes, which makes it easy to stream and easy to recommend.
• Systems that surprise their maker. The joker combinations create stories, and stories are what players share.
• A small toolkit, on purpose. A lightweight framework and a tiny budget kept the project finishable for one person.
• The right partner at the right time. Playstack brought distribution and streamer reach that a solo developer could not.
• Protecting the hobby. Choosing a slower update over crunch is a business decision too: the game's maker is still enjoying making it.

What to play next

If you love Balatro's "one more run" pull, try Luck Be a Landlord, the slot-machine roguelike that inspired it, or Slay the Spire, the deckbuilder that defined the genre. For another one-person story with a similar shape, read how Luca Galante turned Vampire Survivors into a phenomenon (our feature), or how Eric Barone built Stardew Valley alone (read here).

Balatro is available on PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, iOS and Android.