Balatro was one of the big hits of 2024, but the roguelike deckbuilder was a "pain in the ass to market" at first before a demo caught fire and helped pave the way to its eventual success.
That comes from Playstack communications director Wout van Halderen, who has spoken at length during a GDC panel on marketing the quirky gem. Halderen begins by sharing that things were tricky initially as the team didn't have "fancy trailers" nor did it have "amazing" screenshots to wow an audience at first glance.
"Balatro was a pain in the ass to market," he says. "We had a couple of other games out there that were also running their campaigns. They have slightly more impressive visuals, slightly higher-end trailers."
- Balatro creator started "properly playing the game myself about a week before launch" and had "a pretty emotional moment" where he realized it's "actually fun"
- Balatro creator initially considered a Steam release in part to help "get a game developer job somewhere," and after 5 million sales I'd say he found one
Thankfully, Playstack had been in this position before. The Case of the Golden Idol was another eventual success that, like Balatro, had challenges to navigate in that the puzzle game was hard to trailer for and didn't have screenshots that blew you away initially.
"It struggled to gain traction, because if anyone has played The Case of the Golden Idol, it has very static screens," van Halderen says. "It's a puzzle game, you have to put words in the right spot. It's also extremely hard to trailer and extremely hard to get people excited for with unconventional assets."
So what do you do? Van Halderen explains that The Case of the Golden Idol taught them that the way forward was word of mouth. Even if a game isn't necessarily the most entertaining for an influencer to stream to their audience, they're not worth cutting out as a simple endorsement on social media goes a long way.
And why stop there? Even beyond traditional influencers, a strong endorsement from anyone with a following can get the word out about the game you're marketing to genre fans and potentially the press, too – giving you something of a snowball effect. With all of that in mind, the team had a sense of deja vu when it came across Balatro.
"People were not going to get very excited about the screenshots, they were not going to get very excited about the trailers," he shares. "But we knew it was so good because we couldn't stop playing it internally."
Alongside pursuing the sort of word of mouth that van Halderen spoke of previously, the Playstack team decided a demo could do wonders for the roguelike deckbuilder. If the magic of a game is in the mechanics, then why not give players a swift route to going hands-on with the game before it releases?
One of Balatro's earlier demos put a limit of 50 rounds on the game before cutting someone off. It proved a success in drumming up some excitement and providing balancing feedback, but also more unconventional wins in that people figured out how to remove that 50-round limit. That's wonderful for getting the word out, but also "kind of scary."
"At the same time, when people go to the effort to crack your game and put it elsewhere because they like it so much, that was nice," he says. "But we wanted to bury that version of the demo and come back with a second demo later on."
Thankfully, the rest of the story is likely as you know it. An eventual launch went smoothly, and Balatro went on to clean up at various award shows while nailing down some neat collaborations with plenty of big hitters. It may have been a "pain" to get the word out at first, but once it got out there, it flew.
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