Balatro creator kicks off supervillain arc, celebrates humanity losing 11,000 years of time to the roguelike across all platforms

Balatro’s taking over the world, and creator Localthunk is loving the view from the top.

We’ve seen nothing but a string of successes from the poker roguelike (in the absolute simplest terms) since it launched back in February, going on to sell 50,000 copies in 10 days, and then a million copies in under a month, and double that by August. More recently, it beat out Stardew Valley and Minecraft on the mobile sales charts and was nominated for three different awards at the Golden Joysticks.

Now we have a completely different metric by which to measure Balatro’s monumental success, as Localthunk is celebrating the fact that “Balatro has been cumulatively played for over 11,000 years across all platforms.” 

That is an absolutely staggering figure, and frankly Localthunk seems a little too eager to celebrate humanity losing that much collective time to a video game, even if it is their own. At least the dev apologized when the mobile port was released even as the game’s publisher half-joked, “productivity be damned”.

All joking aside, it’s been something else watching a relatively niche release become such a behemoth in a fairly short length of time. After all, Localthunk themselves said a few months back that they only expected to sell “maybe 10 copies” and then go back to their IT job. Apparently, it wasn’t until “a day before launch” that they realized they might just have a hit on their hands.

It’s never a bad time to peruse our list of the best roguelikes available today.