Balatro looks like a game that should be filled with microtransactions: More card backs, weird backgrounds, boosters, whatever—the potential for this stuff is virtually limitless. Yet there are none: No MTX, no season passes, no nothing really, except the Friends of Jimbo "collaboration packs," and they're free. Why not?
"The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots and pans," Balatro creator LocalThunk explained very vividly on Bluesky (via GamesRadar).
"Like I get why people add those things but you're shooting your UX in the foot if players are having their first impression and also being bombarded with a bunch of nonsense that isn't actually the game."
He's not wrong, and while you could argue that selling five million copies in a year makes it a little easier to reach the moral high ground, the fact is that Balatro was built this way from the start: You pay your dime, you get your game. It's certainly possible to incorporate MTX into games without overwhelming the UI or otherwise diminishing the experience, but the drive to monetize is so relentless that it rarely works out that way.
"There's like a 95% chance that if the game is FTP then the main menu UI is more complicated than the actual game UI," LocalThunk added in a reply post.
Separate from all this, LocalThunk also shared a bit of "pointless Balatro lore": A bus stop sign outside his apartment in his hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan, where he was living when he began work on Balatro, inspired the art for the "Ride the Bus" joker.
"Every time I see that joker it reminds me of my old apartment," LocalThunk wrote.
Regina was briefly known as "the city that rhymes with fun," but it quickly became apparent that any connection to "fun" was entirely unintentional. Despite that, LocalThunk remains a fan: "I love it there."
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