Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12
Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12
Balatro, the poker-themed roguelite, has successfully appealed PEGI's decision to classify it as PEGI 18 and has now be…
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.
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).