When Balatro exploded in early 2024, it looked like an overnight indie miracle, but the game’s success took planning, strategy, outreach, and a little luck.
Speaking at MIGS 2025, Playstack communications director Wout van Halderen described Balatro’s road to release and the challenge of getting attention for a game that doesn’t show its hand until you play it.
Balatro was an instant obsession with the team at publisher Playstack, but getting anyone else to care was another story. They knew the game was special, but a card-based game using a pixelated art style was a tough sell. You can’t screenshot “trust me, it’s addictive” and expect the press to bite, van Halderen explains.
Balatro’s journey started with a simple Reddit post from developer Localthunk, which led to a spike on Steam as a few thousand players discovered an early demo and refused to stop playing. For Playstack’s scouts, it was a clear signal that they were onto something.
The publisher’s first instinct for bringing the game to market was a classic public relations play. They would sign the game, blast it to the press, and the coverage would follow. But this approach bombed.
“I sent a message to the media. Look at this new game. It looks amazing,” van Halderen says. “And the media was like: yeah, no. This is not for us. This is not going to generate clicks.”
Van Halderen is blunt about why traditional coverage wasn’t coming.
“The media is not there to help you sell your game,” he says. “They are there to generate clicks.”
When the press wouldn’t cover the game, Playstack pivoted to an influencer first strategy. Using tools to track who streamed similar games such as Slay the Spire, Super Auto Pets, and The Binding of Isaac, the publisher built a curated hit list of streamers whose tastes aligned with Balatro’s deckbuilding, machine-building, “one more run” design.
However, even with the right target audience in mind, the pitch still mattered, and the first batch of emails, which were packed with overcooked descriptions of mechanics and features, also failed to land.
Simplicity was key and the breakthrough came when Playstack dropped the marketing speak and focused on the game’s raw stickiness.
“I just emailed people at the end and said it’s a Poker roguelike, play for five minutes and come back to me in three hours.” van Halderen says.
It was a killer pitch, suggesting low commitment, high confidence, and a promise baked in. If the game isn’t good, the joke falls flat. If it is, you’ve just framed their eventual addiction as the punchline.
The pitch worked and streamers began to cover the game. Players soon followed.
The next tactic was a new demo released alongside, but not part of, Steam Next Fest, holding back inclusion in the actual event for a later and more impactful date. This demo pulled tens of thousands of downloads and wishlists, plus a significant average playtime. Those numbers did not just look good internally, they became ammunition for another pass at the media. This time, there was proof that people would click on Balatro and keep playing for a long time.
Meanwhile, a community outreach campaign spun up. Influencers streaming the game funneled players into the official Discord, where the team answered questions directly. Viewers followed their favourite streamers’ runs, shared combos, joined tournaments, and yelled in all caps when the numbers got stupid.
“We used that community very well,” van Halderen says. “And we let them be loud.”
The buzz among streamers, influencers and players was loud enough that traditional games media outlets eventually had to pay attention.
With a hit demo, tournaments, and a thriving Discord, van Halderen describes the prelaunch strategy as an exercise in steadily building awareness.
“We compressed that spring as much as we could,” he says. “And on launch day all we had to do was flick it and see where this game would go.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Balatro went on to earn a million dollars in its first hours on sale, then sell millions more copies, become a social phenomenon, and win multiple major awards.
It looked like an overnight success, but in a world where thousands of promising games disappear in the noise of discoverability, Balatro’s rise was built on iteration, persistence, and careful management of what van Halderen calls the “wheel of attention”.
“You have your media. You have your influencers. And your community.” he says. “Sometimes one won’t move. So you just push the other and see how you can bring it all together.”
Van Halderen says Balatro didn’t find success because it outgunned prettier games in ad spend or spectacle. Instead, the development and publishing teams worked to understand who would love it, found those people, and gave them every possible reason and excuse to shout about it.
