How Do You Find and Scale an Indie Hit Like Balatro?
Every few years, the industry gets humbled. The world’s biggest publishers pour hundreds of millions into cinematic trailers, global marketing blitzes, and teams the size of small armies only to watch a one-person project from Canada steal the spotlight.
That project was Balatro, a poker roguelike built by a solo developer, published by Playstack, and now sitting on more than seven million units sold. To put that in perspective: in the indie space, 100,000 units is considered a solid hit. One million is a dream milestone. Seven million is the kind of anomaly that makes analysts update their frameworks.
Balatro is the poker roguelike nobody asked for and everybody now swears by. It has no glossy metaverse ambitions, no cinematic cutscenes, no $20 million dev team. Just a compulsive loop, 150 jokers, and a player base that keeps going back for “just one more hand.”
I sat down with Harvey Elliott, the CEO of Playstack, the publisher behind Balatro, to dissect the anatomy of a modern indie hit. What I learned is that while the outcome might feel like a lottery win, the process is anything but luck.
The Usual and the Unusual
Playstack runs a discovery team with one simple mandate: meet every developer with every game. That means sourcing through the obvious places like Steam pages and indie showcases, but also living inside Discord servers, Reddit threads, and obscure game jam sites.
Balatro was discovered in one of those “unusual” places, an early demo tucked away online. What Playstack saw was not production polish or even a fully formed vision, but a spark. The kind of loop that hooks you in 45 seconds and leaves you compelled to go again.
As Harvey explained, most of us would have looked at that Balatro prototype and passed. It wasn’t the typical ‘vertical slice’ that AAA executives demand from their studios. The graphics were barebones. The depth wasn’t there yet. But the compulsion was unmistakable. When you find a game that makes you feel like a player rather than a publisher, that’s when the alarm bells go off. That’s when you know you might be staring at something bigger than a curiosity.
The Core Is the Core
Publishers and developers alike love to talk about progression systems, content pipelines, and monetization hooks. But if the thing you’re doing in the first minute isn’t fun, no number of shiny VFX or additional systems will save you.
If there’s one lesson from Balatro, it’s this: the core matters more than everything else. Simplicity doesn’t mean lack of depth. And high production values don’t correlate with sales numbers.
Balatro’s genius lies in its accessibility. Anyone familiar with poker hands can start in seconds, but the modifiers and jokers unfold into a depth you never expected. The stickiness doesn’t come from the breadth of features. Instead, it comes from a core loop that is both familiar and endlessly replayable.
Playstack saw that early and doubled down, partnering with the developer to build progression and depth around it without breaking the purity of the loop.
The Role of the Publisher
This is where the indie publishing ecosystem often gets misunderstood. If a developer can release the game themselves on all the digital platforms, why bother with a publisher at all? According to Harvey, the answer is simple: a publisher earns their keep by making the game bigger than it could have been on its own. That doesn’t mean hijacking creative control or dictating features. It means distribution at scale.
For Balatro, amplification came in the form of carefully crafted messaging, community building, and clever collaborations that extended the game’s lifespan.
Balatro gives players the option to swap out the game's usual Kings, Queens, and Jacks with characters from The Witcher, Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, and Among Us.
Swapping Balatro’s face cards with characters from other indie hits might not sound like much, but it kept the game in players’ minds and tied it into a broader ecosystem of indie culture. That’s the kind of work a developer cannot do alone, and where the right publisher earns their royalty.
Chasing Repeatability in Indie Publishing
The obvious critique is that Balatro is an outlier. You can’t build a business on lightning in a bottle. But Playstack isn’t betting on outliers alone. Their “IP,” as Harvey describes it, is not the games themselves but the process: how they scout, how they evaluate, how they match games to market realities.
That doesn’t eliminate risk. This is still a hit-driven business. But it does shift the odds.
Mortal Shell 2 is a great example of Playstack’s portfolio depth. Don’t expect them to chase the next Balatro. Expect them to chase the next developer who can bottle the same authenticity.
Playstack’s 2025 slate featured titles like: Mortal Shell 2, Voidbreaker, Unbeatable, and the next year is filled with more exciting yet unannounced projects I got a sneak peek of. What ties them together is not genre but ethos. As Harvey put it, “The genre is indie. Indie means characterful, crafted, not homogenized.”
Out of Playstack’s portfolio, nearly every game has at least broken even, with some like Abiotic Factor and Case of the Golden Idol building strong followings. The method isn’t to chase genres or platforms but to hunt for the same spark they saw in Balatro: an accessible loop that scales into depth, paired with a developer who is both talented and focused.
Choosing a Publisher in 2025
Harvey’s advice to developers today is both sobering and empowering. First, ask yourself if you even need a publisher. If you can self-publish, you should. But if you do seek a partner, don’t get hung up on the royalty rate. A 50/50 split is meaningless if the publisher doesn’t actually grow the pie.
What you should focus on is taking references. Talk to other developers who’ve worked with that publisher.
Understand not just how they operate when things go right, but how they behave when things go wrong, because chances are that things will go wrong. And above all, trust your gut. If something feels off in the early conversations, it probably is.
Philosophical Musing
We are living through an indie publishing gold rush. The barriers to entry have collapsed: digital distribution is frictionless, social media can make or break a demo overnight, and capital that once chased free-to-play is suddenly sniffing around premium PC and console. Add to this the talent exodus from big studios, veterans leaving restructures, layoffs, and creative suffocation, and you get a perfect storm: more indie developers than ever before, and an army of newly minted “indie publishers” promising to be their bridge to success.
On the surface, this looks like an opportunity. But it is also noise.
Many of these publishers are opportunistic, built on glossy decks and investor cash rather than discovery discipline or proven distribution. Their pitch is simple: we’ll make you bigger than you could be alone. The reality, more often than not, is that they add little beyond a logo and a diluted royalty split.
Indie development itself is evolving in parallel.
The lone-wolf creator in their bedroom still exists, but AI workflows, off-the-shelf engines, and global talent networks mean small teams can now punch at levels once reserved for mid-size studios. This increases output, but it also raises the stakes: if everyone can build a competent game, the differentiator becomes less about execution and more about visibility. That’s where the publisher's question becomes existential.
Do you even need a publisher? If you can self-publish and have the skills to reach an audience, the answer is no. But when your creative bandwidth is maxed out, when you need amplification, when you want to turn interest into purchases, then the choice of partner becomes everything.
The right partner will grow your pie. The wrong one will put their logo on your game, make promises about marketing, or simply act as a middleman, but the sales you end up with are essentially the same as if you had self-published and you have to share the pot.
In an industry where even the best games struggle to find their audience, that difference a good publisher can make whether a developer lives to make their next game, or becomes another cautionary tale in the graveyard of broken promises.
So yes, Balatro is lightning in a bottle. But Playstack’s success suggests something deeper: in the long run, publishers will be judged not by how many games they sign, but by how many creators they help endure.
In a market full of snake-oil salesmen, that endurance of the relationship between a publisher and a developer might be the rarest and most valuable commodity of all.
