GOTY Dark Horse Balatro's Popularity Explodes Following TGA Nomination | Push Square

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The seductive cult of Balatro continues to spread, with LocalThunk's poker-themed roguelike claiming untold more converts. The game's surprise Game of the Year nomination at Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards caused an explosive uptick in players across multiple platforms. That's in spite of conventional wisdom, which suggests award shows are mostly pageantry; the addictive nature of the scrappy little indie certainly makes a more convincing case for GOTY than Elden Ring DLC.

As VGC notes (citing PocketGamer's statistics), Balatro has reportedly made more than $4 million on mobile since that version's release ten days ago, on 18th November. That's a lot of copies at around $15, timed to coincide with the game's five nominations at The Game Awards. Balatro is currently up for Best Game Direction, Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game, Best Mobile Game, and, of course, the big one, Game of the Year.

It goes further, however. Doing a little Steamdb detective work, you can actually see the more than 100% uptick of active players on Steam following The Game Awards announcement, marked by the «x» below. Balatro was averaging around 7k concurrents prior; now, that number has been sitting above 15k for the past few days.

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Cashing in

Have you heard the good word? Are you a Balatro true believer, and do you think the plucky little underdog can go all the way at Geoff's big show? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Khayl Adam is Push Square's roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games