Balatro, a game with no actual gambling, has been re-rated and pulled from some shops due to gambling.

I have been playing a LOT of Balatro recently (DARN YOU @zombiepie, DARN YOU TO HECK) so I find this situation both amusing and depressing.

Balatro is a game that is based in poker-hands but is no closer to actual poker than something like Pokersmash. It uses poker as an aesthetic motif and mechanical jumping off point to build an addictive deck builder rogue-like that's really about "breaking" the game to build reliable point generation. You don't wager anything in the game, there are no microtransactions, and it is no closer to actual gambling than games like Slay the Spire, which is to say that it does have risk-reward mechanics and elements of chance in what you draw and what you get from shops or opening card packs (bought with virtual money earned in game) but nothing beyond that.

The fact that this game is raising gambling concerns when loot boxes and gacha games are still out there (though more regulated in places like Europe where the game is getting pulled) is a supreme irony.

Gaming does have a gambling problem, a serious one, but it has nothing to do with games that take artistic license with the idea of poker to make something entirely new, and kind of amazing.

The reason Balatro SHOULD be re-rated and banned is because it is addictive as heck and can be VERY FRUSTRATING when I JUST NEED TO HIT A FLUSH TO WIN AND I CAN'T DRAW ANY HEARTS!

For that its creator should go straight to jail and never leave.

I've been waffling on whether or not I should add this to my running Hottest Mess list, and I think I've decided on "yes". Not for me thinking it's a hotter mess than, say, Skull & Bones, but because this situation is incredibly stupid and deserves recognition.

@allthedinos: I mean it's going to be layoffs, right? Even 2 months in it's hard to see it being anything other than layoffs.

I think that it sort of makes sense as a hottest mess but not so much this particular incident as what it says about the slapdash way gambling is being handled in games. To go after the game with a poker motif instead of the games actually getting children addicted to buying loot boxes seems...well...it says a lot.

The stupidity of this definitely needs a shoutout. If they're going to rate Balatro 18+ for having cards in it then they better retroactively rate Super Mario 64 DS 18+ also since it has a poker minigame included with it too.

@ben_h: Pocket Card Jockey, a game that's literally about horse racing and card games (albeit solitaire) is rated Pegi-3.

I mean... I'm not saying this isn't ridiculous given the hot mess that is this industry and its recent willingness to sell gambling addictions to children, but a poker related game probably shouldn't be rated as appropriate for 3-year-olds. They probably should have sorted that out before release though.

@brian_: Why not? I mean if you want to say Pegi-7 I won't argue with you, and in the case of Balatro it has some semi-creepy imagery that I would not expose a 3 year old to (it is also definitely not a game that 3 year olds would enjoy) but I don't think poker is in any way inherently inappropriate for kids. What is the 3 year old going to do, head down to the casino and start betting?

I played poker when I was like 5 or 6. Not for real money, of course, but just as a game to pass the time. And it's in a lot of other games that are child appropriate (as noted Mario 64 DS has it.) You can argue that betting is inappropriate for very young kids but there is no actual betting in Balatro. I don't just mean real money but of any kind. The only things it draws from poker are the hands and some of the terms like ante. It does not teach you how to play poker, beyond what the hands are and which are most valuable, which, again, is something I was taught at age 5 and something a lot of my peers knew about.

The broadcast of the World Series of Poker, which is actual poker, is rated TV-G.

@bigsocrates: For whatever it's worth, I disqualify winners and runner-ups from previous years from the list. Layoffs won the commenter's choice award last year and had its jersey raised to the rafters; I guess we could call it the Mario Lemieux of gaming news and unretire it for a second run? At any rate, I plan to post my list in progress in a few weeks, maybe sooner if something batshit like the Unity fiasco happens again.

To your other point, I think it's super representative of entertainment regulators to abhor the aesthetic of gambling but not real, substantive gambling. There's a total lack of curiosity to check the basic fact of whether you can actually put real money into the game after you've bought it. The game cannot possibly improve your poker skills beyond recognizing when you have a scoring hand and when you might be on the verge of having a great scoring hand (and even then...). This is the kind of braindead decisionmaking that gave the gaming community a kneejerk distrust of regulators of all kinds in the 90's.

@allthedinos: I think layoffs are serious enough that they NEED to be on the table. These are people's lives, the people who work (often inhumane hours) to make the games we love. It seems in poor taste to say "oh you got fired and lost your house, we already talked about that last year. Now let's discuss how bad Suicide Squad is. That game sure sucks, huh?" It's serious enough that it merits at least discussion.

I just don't understand how incurious and stupid these people seem to be. Anyone who spent a moment thinking about or discussing what Balatro actually is would realize that it's not a gambling game. I'm not even talking real money. I can see an argument that a game about gambling could be a gateway to real gambling even without real money. I wouldn't make it 18 only but I could see restricting it to teens. But this is just a game about card games and chasing high scores. You literally cannot place a bet in the game. And if you try to learn about hand values and probabilities from Balatro you will be a terrible poker player because the game is all about breaking those values.

I won the black chip level with a deck that was guaranteed a flush on every hand and a suite of planet cards and other stuff that made flushes the most valuable hands. It uses poker as a base to build something totally different on top of it.

@bigsocrates: I also loved poker from a young age and have somehow managed to avoid walking into a casino to gamble my money away. I still think there is danger in introducing non-gambling forms of poker at a young age. I don't know what the right age rating for this thing is. I don't think it's necessarily 18+, but it's probably not 3+ either.

I think we're all ignoring the most important part of the OP, and that's this: yes, darn @zombiepie straight to heckin' heck.

@brian_: As I said I'm open to some rating other than 3.

But I'd also like to know what the danger of introducing non-gambling poker to young children is.

The argument for sex and violence basically comes down to normalization and trauma. It can traumatize a young child to see a bloody Mortal Kombat fatality and they won't understand sex (which you also don't want to normalize for them because you don't want them exploited.)

With poker...they're not going to start gambling as very young kids. They can't. I don't really think it's something that will affect them in that way. The closest I can see to an argument is that if they get to like poker young they will be way into it when they're older and start gambling then, but I don't think it works that way.

@bigsocrates: I mean, a 3-year-old can't walk into a liquor store and buy a bottle of Jack either, but you aren't going to see depictions of alcohol in children's games either. It's definitely about normalizing potential dangers for later in life for me, and I think it does and should play a factor in age ratings.

@brian_: I don't think it's the same thing. It's true that young children can't buy alcohol, but they can steal it from their parents and there's a real risk that kids (not 3 year olds, but more like 10+) will do just that if you glamorize it. Many people reading this probably did. The same is true of cigarettes. And both alcohol and cigarettes can be physically addictive so there's the fear that if kids start young they'll never stop.

Conversely to your point about not being able to buy alcohol, a 3 year old CAN walk into any store and buy a deck of playing cards, many of which come with rules for playing poker in them. So society actually says they CAN buy the stuff you need to play poker and even instructions on how to do it. They can even buy poker chips! They just can't buy a video game with no betting that does not teach you to play poker.

@bigsocratesSo, there have been a few updates to this story. Thus far, it does seem like the Balatro team have won all of their appeals, including against PEGI, which largely started this whole controversy.

@zombiepie: Yes, it looks like it's gotten relisted, which is a positive, though I'd note that on British PSN it is still rated 18+, which probably restricts purchases. Nonetheless it's sold 500,000 copies, so it's presumably a big hit compared to what it cost to make, which is well deserved.

However the fact that this happened at all, and the fact that they already had the rating reduced from 18 to 3 pre-release and then had a reversal for no reason exposes just how flawed the rating systems are, and how much damage they can, and do, do. Balatro was a big enough game to be okay, but it's the ones we don't hear about that really get screwed.

When i was in school we used to play chess for money.

@cikame: Get PEGI on the line.

I guess some games, like Poker, are inextricably tied to gambling in people's minds while others get a free pass. Every other ad I got on Twitch in the months before the super bowl was about some gambling site where you could bet on some dude kicking a field goal or something. If anyone tried to limit 'murica's access to football games though, that would probably start a riot. Shit ain't fair.

Unrelated, but it's always weird to me to see people look down on kick.com as the knockoff of twitch for gambling weirdos when twitch is still very eager to show you ads for gambling.

At one time the criticism made sense since Kick was both targeting kids and had gambling/slots categories as major categories while Twitch banned that kind of thing. Now, of course, Twitch has a lot of these same categories along with other categories that encourage potentially dangerous financial behaviour like the new-ish daytrading category (I'm not kidding about this one. Last year they kept featuring this stock bro on the front page and now there's a whole category of streams like it. They all couch everything they say with "this is not financial advice" but we all know what the gig is). Add on all the gambling ads and the two platforms are starting to become indistinguishable.

edit: Huh, it appears they already got rid of the stocks/day trading category. When I saw it (I think it was last week or two weeks ago) my first thought was "that seems like it shouldn't be allowed" and I guess I was right. From a liability perspective, that entire category was extremely dangerous.

There are currently over 100k people watching slots, casino, poker, and other things like that on Twitch though. Oh and there's also a dedicated crypto category, so make of that what you will.

How does a game get re-rated after release? Isn’t it usually only if some wild new content is “discovered”/was-always-in-the-game-but-not-accessible-unless-you-hack-the-game type stuff? GTA 3 hot coffee, the nudity in Oblivion, etc.?

Balatro is so upfront with its whole vibe and imagery, so I don’t understand what the ratings board could’ve possibly missed the first time. Does it just take a few pearl-clutching people post-release saying to “please think of the children, this is teaching them gambling addiction” and suddenly it gets re-rated and pulled to be on the safe side?