Balatro hits 500k copies sold in 10 days, proving to be one of this year's smash indie hits
Balatro has been a smash success for solo developer LocalThunk. The poker deck-building roguelike has reached a new milestone, selling over 500k copies in 10 days.
What happened?
Publisher PlayStack shared the news on X (formerly Twitter), saying that the team is “beyond grateful” for all the support. The 500k figure includes Balatro’s sales across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, but the share of each platform is unclear.
The game surpassed 250k copies sold in the first 72 hours after its launch on February 20, meaning it went on to sell another 250k units in the past seven days.
Last week, PlayStack said the game exceeded all expectations, generating over $1 million in gross revenue in the first eight hours of launch. It also reached profitability in its first hour.
🎉 Incredible news! 🥳
Balatro has hit the 500,000 copies mark in just 10 days across all platforms!
Thank you for your amazing support – we're beyond grateful! 🙏#Balatro #Steam #NintendoSwitch #PlayStation #Xbox pic.twitter.com/peIKciig1v
— Playstack (@PlaystackGames) March 6, 2024
Balatro received acclaim from both critics and players, currently holding a 97% rating on Steam based on more than 13.5k reviews. At launch, the game peaked at over 23k concurrent players on the platform, eventually climbing to 37.3k CCU.
This makes it the 12th biggest Steam launch of 2024, behind titles like Supermarket Simulator (38k CCU), Persona 3 Reload (45k CCU), Tekken 8 (49.9k CCU), and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (56.9k CCU).
Balatro faced delisting due to age rating confusion
- Despite its commercial success, Balatro faced some unexpected struggles. On March 1, PlayStack announced that the title had been temporarily removed from sale in several countries after PEGI changed its age rating from 3+ to 18+ “due to a mistaken belief that the game ‘contains prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.'”
— Playstack (@PlaystackGames) March 1, 2024
- Specifically, Baltro was pulled from the Nintendo eShop in Europe. As GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless explained, this could be related to “PEGI giving 18+ ratings for ‘gambling’ with playing card games” and “Nintendo pulling any Switch game that goes up 2 ratings notches, and forcing resubmission.”
- Balatro developer LocalThunk stated that they condone gambling, adding that “I did add risk/reward mechanics and RNG to Balatro, but these are core mechanics to the genre at large.”
- PlayStack later noted that the game should be back on sale later this week, thanking its partners at Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and Valve for continued support.
