How Balatro hit 1 million sales in less than a month!We talk to the folks behind it. Also: lots of discovery news & some GDC bingo.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.] In ‘perfect timing’ news, LocalThunk & Playstack’s ‘poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder’ Balatro just announced it hit 1 million units sold across PC and console (in <1 month!) Why perfect timing? Because it’s the subject of our lead story today…. Oh, and thanks to our inaugural newsletter sponsor, user-generated content distribution service mod.io - you’ll see their message today and Wednesday. Here’s info if you’d like to advertise, too… [Also: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data suite for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, seven detailed game discovery eBooks & lots more.] Deep dive: how Balatro hit 1 million sales so fast We presume you have a view on why people love roguelike deckbuilder Balatro. Our 2c? It’s the joyous diversity of joker strategies in each ‘run’! (Not the same subgenre, but reminds us of The Binding Of Isaac re: radically different player outcomes.) And now the $15 title has officially sold a million, we reached out to publisher Playstack and solo, pseudonymous dev LocalThunk to get their comments on how this all went down. Firstly, let’s look at the pre-release Steam wishlist trends for the game:
As you can see, the game has thrived on both players - and big YouTubers - being able to play and share it, with big spikes around those times. We asked Playstack’s Liz Cheng-Moore about how the publisher played to the game’s strengths. She noted: “In our initial marketing strategy, we decided that the best way to entice people with Balatro was to show people playing it. Pre-announce assets such as trailers, we suspected, were not going to be as effective. Accordingly, we identified three key marketing pillars to underpin our campaign: A playable demo, influencer engagement, and stirring a passionate community. Firstly, playable: we focused a great deal of time on promoting the game through a custom demo. Extensive discussions were held to determine how to craft a miniature version of Balatro that encapsulates all its key elements including roguelike mechanics, synergy, and replayability. We ultimately settled on a demo featuring a concise selection of features from the full game, with no round limit on play, enabling users to repeatedly experience a condensed version of the complete game. In the first three months following the demo release, we amassed 100k downloads on Steam.” This makes a lot of sense! When the game is killer, you should carefully craft a demo and release it super early to get reach - especially among the key PC gaming crowd, for whom a card-based game is probably the most natural user interface. GameDiscoverCo guesstimates PC sales are ~80% of that million sales, btw. And the devs gave us Steam country stats (to March 1st) headed by the U.S. (33%), China (26%), France (7%), Canada & the UK (4% each), Germany and Korea (3%), and Australia (2%). Back to Liz, for notes on the other parts of the marketing: “For the second and third pillars, we decided to host a fun streamer tournament: Jimbo’s Invitational. We invited high-profile creators who have streamed Balatro to compete together in a bespoke tournament to find out who could achieve the highest score. The competitive nature of the tournament naturally encouraged creators to continue streaming for longer durations. The 24-hour tournament attracted 5,600 peak viewers…. community engagement.. was significant, with members following the proceedings on Discord, sharing the latest scores, and discussing tactics. What enhanced [things] further was the participation of some streamers actively engaging with the community in Discord.” Balatro’s gameplay win - not a lucky accident?
This was all extremely helpful. But we also wanted to know about that killer gameplay was formed. So we asked dev LocalThunk: “It's clear that Balatro has an INCREDIBLY strong game hook and also core game loop. How early did you realize this, and how long did it take to hone the gameplay mechanics?” His fascinating initial reply on this was “I try to mostly focus on the flaws”, and he added:
He concluded: “Using the 1 hour retention metric as a rubric for the ‘hook’ has been useful, and that number has improved as the game has evolved since the first public demo.” One other tidbit we found fascinating? We asked LocalThunk about game balance and patching - which he is actively doing, btw. But interestingly, he is also fine with people sometimes ‘breaking’ the game, for possibility space reasons: “The design of a game like Balatro is always being pulled in two directions: First, people need to be able to break a game like this in order to really experience the depth of it and see the gamut of what is possible. Second, if things are too unbalanced, then decisions become much less meaningful - because having a clear choice in a given situation is the same as having no choice at all, which is counter to fun.” The overall result for Balatro is, we can assure you, not counter to fun. And to conclude, we asked the team behind it what they were most surprised by. Besides just ‘everybody talking about the game all the time’, hah, there’s one particularly offbeat ‘win’. For the game’s creator LocalThunk, it’s the following: “That Balatro showed up as an official reference on the ‘Gros Michel’ Wikipedia page.” Yes, that’s… all kinds of bananas, isn’t it? *hook appears and pulls us offstage* Launch in-game & cross-platform UGC with our sponsor: mod.io
mod.io offers a complete solution for user-generated content distribution; on any platform from PC, to consoles, mobile and VR. Plugins for Unreal and Unity, and a SDK for custom engines make implementation easy for all games. Built as a white label solution, mod.io services allow you to create a fully tailored experience for your UGC creator community (in-game & web custom UI, SSO, moderation rules, real-time metrics); keeping your players engaged in your own ecosystem. Reach out to discuss UGC implementation, or sign up to our newsletter covering our latest product updates, and industry trends. Game discovery & game marketing - not the same! We think indie dev Danny Weinbaum - who made lush 2019 3D ‘walking & painting’ game Eastshade with his wife and just published a YouTube video (650k views!) about how they did it - is a pretty smart cookie. His studio is currently working on ‘story-driven witch academy RPG’ Songs Of Glimmerwick - currently at 87,000 Steam wishlists without demos or Next Fest appearances. And his latest YouTube video (above) is a bullseye for what we talk about. Weinbaum says in the intro: “It seems that a lot of indies have this idea that discoverability is the only thing that stands in the way of their game being a top seller. They say to themselves: ‘Well, I know I can make a game - the problem is that I just don’t know how to market it.’” And here’s the main takeaways we wanted to point out from his must-watch video:
His conclusion? “The games market is largely still rational, in that if you build something substantial it's likely you can compete - if your product can hang with the top of your genre on every level.” That’s not just gameplay, but also art, trailers, and hook. So, what you’re looking to make is “a solid title, backed by ‘commercially serious’ production competency and effort, in a high demand genre on Steam.” And if you get all of that right, Danny thinks you have a higher chance of being rewarded. We’re 100% on the same page about all of this. The only issue, in 2024, is that the financial reward for getting it ‘right’ is getting diluted, due to the sheer amount of games on all platforms. But them’s the breaks, huh? The game platform & discovery news round-up…
Finishing up for today, we have a lot of neat discovery & platform news to cover. So let’s make like a boulder and roll:
Finally, ICO’s Thomas Bidaux has been making a GDC ‘bingo card’ for a few years now, and here’s his 2024 edition, which he freely admits is ‘The Depressing Edition’. Will your GDC conversations get you a bingo this year? Let’s find out:
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.] You're currently a free subscriber to The GameDiscoverCo newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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