LogIn"Balatro was developed by someone who is staunchly anti-gambling, and painstaking care has been taken to ensure that the game does not feature gambling mechanics of any kind."
Balatro, a poker-inspired roguelike deck builder, has been a big hit since its release in February. Despite being explicitly described as poker-based on the Steam page, turns out the developer doesn't even play poker and says it's actually Big Two, a widely popular Asian card game, underneath it all.
Not only the developer of a poker game doesn't play poker, but LocalThunk also confessed he doesn't even play video games that much and therefore avoided using typical game terminology in Balatro, with all this probably being part of the reason the game became such a fascinating phenomenon.
Image Credit: LocalThunk, Balatro
Balatro received a very positive response from players, describing the game as hypnotically satisfying, enormous in its complexity, and very addictive. However, despite the poker-based core mechanics, it was strongly emphasized that Balatro isn't a gambling game and got age rated as 3+ on digital stores.
This has changed overnight with a sudden age rating change from 3+ to 18+ without any advance warning, following the game's removal from sale on a few digital stores.
Apparently, this happened "due to mistaken belief the game 'contains prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling", as the game publisher Playstack said on the official X/Twitter account.
"Balatro does not allow or encourage gambling, and we fundamentally believe the ratings decision is unfounded. Balatro was developed by someone who is staunchly anti-gambling, and painstaking care has been taken to ensure that the game does not feature gambling mechanics of any kind", commented Playstack.
The publisher added, that the Balatro case was specifically discussed with the ratings board in October and the game hasn't changed since it received the 3+ rating back then.
It appears that the game was mostly removed from Nintendo Switch stores across Europe due to triggering the automatic safeguard systems with the 18+ rating. However, neither PlayStation nor Xbox stores were affected and Playstack is very confident Balatro remains available on PC as well and is currently looking into solutions to bring the game back on sale.
Get Balatro on Steam here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.