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That’s right, it’s Jimbo’s world now… and Jimbo will fucking cut you like a deck of cards.
Honestly, Balatro probably would have had an easier time if it had just been a card game that wasn’t based on a poker theme.
Being based on poker does mean that players enter with probably already knowing the hands, but honestly…I’m not even sure that that buys that much. And in the past, I’ve wondered whether use of poker “hands” is actually a good idea – that is, Balatro has one “build around” a hand, and in that context, the hands aren’t really balanced the way they are in poker.
I think that what Balatro accomplished is to show that there’s a lot of unexplored space in computer deckbuilding games. I’m not sure that the decision to use a standard playing card deck or to theme the game on an existing card game (which doesn’t actually bear all that much resemblance to the real challenges in Balatro) actually contributed that much to Balatro’s success.
It was actually a net negative from my standpoint – I held off getting the game for a while because I’d played video poker before and considered it to be pretty boring, and the fact that Balatro looked like that wasn’t a plus.
I’m pretty ambivalent either way. I like watching Poker tournaments, but I don’t like playing poker, yet poker themes in games don’t really bother me (lots of games have a “full house” or “flush” concept). So it being based on poker neither improved nor hurt my opinion of it, it’s just a design decision to reuse poker concepts.
I wonder if Balatro would’ve had a similar impact if it wasn’t based on poker. A lot of people care about poker, and using poker terminology has a certain flair to it. I imagine people were attracted to the “forbidden fruit” of a poker-themed game, helping with marketing.
But then the PEGI rating surely also caused issues. So I don’t know whether it was a net positive or negative. Either way, it’s a fun game that has very little to do with poker other than theming.
IMO the gambling themes are the selling point of balatro. Hell ignoring the poker half, the dev’s themselves basically said the whole scoring theme etc… was made to be slot machine style gameplay.
To be honest I think that’s a very large percentage of it’s popularity, is just that viewpoint making it accessible to, non gamers and non roguelike fans. I don’t think it would be a top seller if done as a “slay the spire”, or done with a theme that doesn’t have appeal to non-gamers.
Also I would say, balatro is like 2 or 3 very minor changes away from easily being a “suck crazy amount of money from gambling addicts” game. IE if someone took balatro, released it on mobile platforms as f2p. Only differences being to slightly increase the speed of the anti score. and say start each game with 2 optional joker packs (for $1 chose between one of 3 random negative jokers), for $2 chose one of 5 negative jokers). (obviously replacing the dollar amounts with purchasable in game currency). You’d easily get into top mobile apps and make a killing.
don’t think it would be a top seller if done as a “slay the spire”, or done with a theme that doesn’t have appeal to non-gamers.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it, but wasn’t blown away by it.
I’m not interested in gambling, the closest I get is studying systems for beating the house. So when I see Balatro, I don’t see anything related to gambling, because there are no stakes and only strategies for beating the various bosses, and the poker theme is just flavor.
But yeah, I could totally see it doing well as F2P game, I just would be completely uninterested. That’s why I was so surprised by the original PEGI rating, because it’s so out of line with my experience playing it.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it, but wasn’t blown away by it.
I think you and I are probably similar in that. I’d say I really enjoyed about 20 hours of it, then played an additional 30 hours where I was hoping things would start getting fun again, but it never came.
Ignoring the video Slots scoring, and poker themes. I would still say luck is so much stronger in balatro then on any roguelike I’ve played. To the extent that the best “strategy”, is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don’t show up before the ante outpaces you.
In short, psudo-gambling mechanics are IMO largely what hooks people in the game, which I also have to say the PEGI group may actually be if anything slightly underestimating the risk. IE the game is 100% not gambling, but it draws on everything in the brain that gambling does. “Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further”. I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there’s a reason why there’s such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics.
Balatro IMO leans into all of the hook on gambling tropes, just avoiding the last step of exploiting it to get users to continue to pay them money. It’s actually a pretty reasonable question to ask… does it put kids/teenagers into a mindset that will make them more vulnerable to a less ethical game developer that takes that last step.
“Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further”. I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there’s a reason why there’s such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics.
The psychological term at the core of the mechanic is a variable reward schedule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement_schedules
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of an organism’s future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus
Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[14]: 88
Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction.
Applications
Reinforcement and punishment are ubiquitous in human social interactions, and a great many applications of operant principles have been suggested and implemented. Following are a few examples.
Addiction and dependence
Positive and negative reinforcement play central roles in the development and maintenance of addiction and drug dependence. An addictive drug is intrinsically rewarding; that is, it functions as a primary positive reinforcer of drug use. The brain’s reward system assigns it incentive salience (i.e., it is “wanted” or “desired”),[31][32][33] so as an addiction develops, deprivation of the drug leads to craving. In addition, stimuli associated with drug use – e.g., the sight of a syringe, and the location of use – become associated with the intense reinforcement induced by the drug.[31][32][33] These previously neutral stimuli acquire several properties: their appearance can induce craving, and they can become conditioned positive reinforcers of continued use.
The thing is that many games use an aspect of random reward, which leverages the conditioning effect of a variable ratio schedule to get people to want to play. Rogue had random drops in 1980, for something early that I can name off-the-cuff. Like, having random rewards are all over video games, were around long before F2P or pay-to-win lootboxes. Like, banning games for leveraging that mechanic would ban a huge range of video games, card games, board games, etc.
I think that the reason that people worry about it with gambling is that a runaway impact on someone directly results in draining money from them, especially since someone can hope to “make money back”. “This will help encourage someone to buy an expansion or sequel” is acceptable, but “money is spent on a per-roll basis in the hopes of getting money” is not.
Balatro definitely makes use of random rewards…but many, many games do that.
Balatro looks a little like a gambling game. You can go and play video poker with actual money, and the first round or so of Balatro is simply video poker, with virtual money, before Balatro’s mechanics enter. But…I’m not sure that that makes Balatro particularly problematic. Maybe, I guess, someone could play Balatro, then think that “video poker is cool” and then go play video poker for money. I guess maybe that’s what the PEGI people were upset about.
I don’t know how much any special Balatro convertability into an actual gambling game is a factor. I mean, I am pretty confident that you could take virtually any video game and turn it into a gambling game. Hell, a number of free-to-play games spanning many genres do have some degree of winning at least in-game stuff when you insert money.
To the extent that the best “strategy”, is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don’t show up before the ante outpaces you.
Yeah, I feel this. Slay the Spire ability to choose paths gives you some control over fixing some bad RNG, so Balatro feels more luck-based.
That said, it doesn’t really feel like a “gambling” game. Gambling games have essentially no skill, whereas Balatro does have a lot of player choice, where the “best” choice isn’t obvious (i.e. can’t just follow a system). Gambling, however, usually has minimal player interaction, or there’s optimal play that cuts the gap between the house and the player the most (but never more than 50%). It’s basically like other deck building games, just with a poker theme and a bit more RNG.
Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro’s RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.
I don’t know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.
That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance… at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.
I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.
The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”.
Also I would say, balatro is like 2 or 3 very minor changes away from easily being a “suck crazy amount of money from gambling addicts” game.
That’s an interesting point.
thinks
Countries do have various restrictions, and because there’s only one store (in Apple’s case) or only one default store (in Google’s case), it’s fairly-easy to raise the bar to what users have access too. A number of countries have restrictions on gambling games. My guess is that if a country wants to tamp down on mobile gambling games, it probably can.
PC is harder, but fewer people play PC games. Web games are harder too, and there’s a very low bar to using those.
So it being based on poker neither improved nor hurt my opinion of it, it’s just a design decision to reuse poker concepts.
It’s not so much “poker” as a broad theme that I have an issue with, but specifically video poker:
I held off getting the game for a while because I’d played video poker before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_poker
Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. It is played on a computerized console similar in size to a slot machine.
Video poker is a single-player game. The problem with video poker is that it’s a pretty simple game. It’s been solved. You can go dig up the numbers for when to do what to play optimally, given the information you have. It’s repetitive. There’s just…not a lot going on with it as a game, even if it kinda looks like traditional poker.
Traditional poker is a multiplayer game. Different players are playing against each other. That introduces bluffing, and that makes for a more-complicated game.
That being said, even traditional poker is mostly solved. It’s just complicated-enough enough to do that most people aren’t going to play optimally.
Von Neumann solved poker – including bluffing – for optimal play back when he developed game theory (and in fact, did his work with the initial intent of solving poker).
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/neumann.html
For Von Neumann, the inspiration for game theory was poker, a game he played occasionally and not terribly well. Von Neumann realized that poker was not guided by probability theory alone, as an unfortunate player who would use only probability theory would find out. Von Neumann wanted to formalize the idea of “bluffing,” a strategy that is meant to deceive the other players and hide information from them.
In his 1928 article, “Theory of Parlor Games,” Von Neumann first approached the discussion of game theory, and proved the famous Minimax theorem. From the outset, Von Neumann knew that game theory would prove invaluable to economists. He teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist at Princeton, to develop his theory.
Their book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, revolutionized the field of economics. Although the work itself was intended solely for economists, its applications to psychology, sociology, politics, warfare, recreational games, and many other fields soon became apparent.
To the extent that poker remains unsolved, it’s trying to determine whether someone is playing non-optimally or has other weaknesses and trying to take advantage of that (e.g. exploiting information leaks via tells, something like that).
traditional poker is mostly solved
It’s only solved mathematically, but that’s not the interesting part of poker to me, the interesting part is the psychology of it. You communicate through your bets, posture and posture at the table, as well as when you show vs hide folded hands. The actual statistics are only interesting when trying to decide whether someone is bluffing or playing “optimally.” And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
So yeah, exploiting tells and other non-book actions makes poker interesting to watch at the higher levels.
None of that relates to Balatro at all. There are no stakes, no bluffing, etc. How you play a given hand is a lot less interesting than how you construct your deck. It doesn’t play like poker at all, it plays like Slay the Spire w/ a poker theme.
And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
Any theory, to have any impact, must change how you act.
You can’t get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker. The best you can do is exploit what I mentioned – information leaks, or try to find someone who isn’t playing an optimal strategy and exploit that. But if poker player X is playing according to what von Neumann would advise, they have a bluffing approach where, no matter the strategy you adopt, you will not tend to come out ahead in the long run. The best you can do is equal them. They can tell you that that’s their strategy, say “I went and read up on game theory, and here’s how I’m playing”, and it still won’t permit you to do so.
Now, that’s a conservative strategy. Minimax relies on the assumption that the other player will play optimally, given the information available to them. A “von Neumann” player won’t necessarily exploit weaknesses that someone else has as strongly as some other strategy might. So, let’s say that a player absolutely never folds, for example. It’s possible to adopt some non-von-Neumann strategy that permits a player to “win more” against a player playing suboptimally…though a von-Neumann player would still be winning as well. It just means that no other player in poker can get an advantage, over the long run, over someone playing what von Neumann would recommend.
None of that relates to Balatro at all.
I agree — bluffing is outside its scope. Balatro’s similarities are to video poker, not traditional, multiplayer poker (and the real gameplay is in the deckbuilding aspect).
You can’t get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker.
These types of “solved games” make some pretty hefty assumptions, such as limiting possible actions. But that can only really happen with online poker, when you do it live, you introduce a ton of variance that a good player can exploit.
Algorithms may have “solved” a game, but that doesn’t mean a human has. It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move, which will give you the best possible outcome. Does that make chess uninteresting? No. At the highest levels, it’s less a strategy or tactical game and more psychological. The idea is to surprise your opponent and play something they aren’t prepared for which gets them into time trouble figuring out your plans, and the clock becomes a piece you can use against them. So the prep for a game is studying their past games and guessing what they might be preparing against you, and preparing something they won’t expect to use against them.
When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit, and that’s interesting. So the game of live poker remains interesting.
It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move
Chess isn’t solved: chess computers have outplayed the best current human players, but they can’t always provide an optimal move, can’t look down branches far enough. Although they do use Minimax!
But it is similar to the extent that you can get not-perfectly-optimal play that will probably do better than a human.
When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit
That’s probably true.
they can’t always provide an optimal move
After the first 10 moves or so, they can. There’s something like 9 billion possible chess positions after that point, and opening theory is well established, so it’s largely solved. Computers can calculate something like 100 moves deep (and nearly all branches), though they do use heuristic to eliminate unlikely branches.
There are some interesting games between top bots because of that heuristic, but any of the top bots will consistently beat a human because they can compute orders of magnitude more possible game states.
So it’s essentially solved, meaning that, in practice, a top AI will pretty much always beat or draw a top player. The difference in rating between a top bot and the top human player is something like the difference between a GM and someone aiming for IM, and we expect a similar performance difference.
