Global productivity to crash to zero as Balatro announces it's coming to phones

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Business dailies the world over closed their doors for the last time today as the international economy got ready to give up for good. The reason: All-devouring time black hole Balatro has announced it's jumping off of our PCs and consoles and onto our phones, becoming even more portable than it is on Steam Deck. You'll soon be able to play it wherever and whenever you want, which is everywhere and always.

Balatro hits the iOS App Store and Android's Google Play on September 26. If, like me, you have an ongoing Apple Arcade subscription for reasons you don't entirely comprehend, you'll get it free through that. Otherwise, expect to pay about $10.

This is not, strictly speaking, PC gaming news. Perspicacious readers will note that iPhones and Android devices are phones, or at best tablets, and last I checked the title of our outlet was not "Phone-Carrying Gamer". But Balatro is by all accounts an excellent game: It scored 91% in Abbie Stone's Balatro review for PCG and regularly sucks up hours of PC Gamer staff time. I suspect this situation will only become more acute once it's literally in all of our pockets at all times.

If you're somehow unaware of Balatro, it's a deckbuilding roguelike themed (kinda) around poker. But rather than just trying to score hum-drum, traditional poker hands, you're juggling all sorts of multipliers and effects (including over a hundred Joker cards with unique abilities) in an attempt to generate absurdly high scores. For a while there, the PCG Slack featured at least one person a day posting a number bigger than the total of atoms in the universe to brag about their latest Balatro high score.

It's the most moreish thing ever made, and while it's been portable via Steam Deck (and Switch) for a good while now, its presence on phones is gonna make it more accessible than ever. I almost hope I have a long stay in a waiting room coming up; the hours would just melt away.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.