Balatro's creator has barely played other deckbuilders, and thinks that's partly why it succeeded

rockpapershotgun.com:

The roguelikelike deck-building poker game Balatro is frankly the only game I care for right now. My head fizzes with ideas for fiendish combos and deeply illegal hands. I'm delighted by its deserved success, with the makers boasting that it sold enough to become profitable within one hour then sold 250,000 copies in 72 hours. In a recent interview, the developer claims that part of why it's so damn successful is because they've barely played other roguelikelike deckbuilders so it's free to do its own thing outside genre conventions. What's interesting to me in this is how Balatro has built on a game which did influence it, the slot machine-building game Luck Be A Landlord.

Balatro is mostly made by pseudonymous solo developer LocalThunk (aside from music, sounds, the various publishing responsibilities, testing, localisation, and such), who recently gave an interview to GamesRadar+. One topic raised is the origins of Balatro, and the games which have—and haven't—influenced it.

LocalThunk explained that the game which game Balatro started out based on the Cantonese card game Big Two. Then they encountered videos of Luck Be A Landlord and became, in GamesRadar+'s words, obsessed with it—but without playing it. Like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord is a 'make numbers do big' game, only you're building a wildly complex slot machine crammed full of synergies then hitting a button and watching random chance play out. Landlord is the game Balatro has most reminded me of, so I'm not too surprised to hear that LocalThunk says they have little experience with the genre it perhaps ostensibly resembles: roguelikelike deckbuilders. They say they've only played genre champion Slay The Spire to check out a technical solution.

"That's part of the reason why [Balatro] has succeeded," LocalThunk told GamesRadar+. "I don't know the tropes. I only played Slay The Spire last May because I wanted to understand what they did with [gamepad] controls. If I'd played that game before designing