Clown emojis all around
Why should we care what a talking horse pseudo-plinco game thinks should be the age rating of their competitors?
It’s a good question
That’s the fun part, you don’t have to care. The first and only step is to just keep scrolling—better luck next time.
Wut? Pan European Game Information (PEGI) is the European equivalent of ESRB. Their ratings matter because they have an obvious bias against indies, which hurts their sales.
I was jokingly referring to PEGGLE
Ah. I’m guessing most people missed the joke :)
Yeah they should’ve gone with Hank Hill’s wife
Loot boxes suck but the only thing separating this game from gambling is the use of real money. It’s literally a poker game.
This is the Steam Store description -
Combine valid poker hands with unique Joker cards in order to create varied synergies and builds. Earn enough chips to beat devious blinds, all while uncovering hidden bonus hands and decks as you progress. You’re going to need every edge you can get in order to reach the boss blind, beat the final ante and secure victory.
Yeah they were always going to get PEGI 18. This moaning is just a way to sell their game.
Balatro doesn’t have anything like gambling. There’s no betting. You don’t even have an opponent. The chips are only points, and the goal is to get as high a score as you can. The rules vary wildly from poker in ways that could never work with multiple players, let alone with real cards. It just looks like poker at the start and that description helps give you an initial idea of how to play.
It’s literally not.
In Balatro, the Ante is the boss’s health and chips are the amount of damage done to a boss. The poker hands are just attacks done to the boss’s health. They use poker terms because it’s inspired by card games, not because there’s gambling.
The only gambling in this game is picking the goddamn wheel card even though I know it’s going to give me “nope!”
I didn’t say there was and neither did PEGI. The issue is all the terminology and visuals are gambling related. This is like giving a cigarette smoker a nicotine vape and saying it’s not cigarettes. It’s technically true but you’d be insane to authorize it for kids.
This analogy is garbage. The “nicotine vape for kids” isn’t Balatro, it’s loot boxes. Balatro would be like candy cigarettes.
Funny you should mention candy cigarettes.
Whether it’s candy cigarettes or a nicotine vape depends purely on the person playing the game. A gambling addict could easily see this as their nicotine vape, and it could easily prime kids for casinos.
A good link, maybe image may be harmful even if it’s without context
The whole point of the post is real gambling is rated as totally safe for kids. As long as it doesn’t use card or poker chips as imagery. Why is getting kids to actually gamble ok? Why is imagery associated with gambling so much worse than actual gambling for kids?
No the whole point of this post is performative outrage as marketing. They knew exactly what rating a faux casino game was going to get them.
You meant “chocolate cigarette” for your analogy, I remember they used to exists when I was a kid, don’t know if they still do.
Funny you should mention candy cigarettes.
Whether it’s candy cigarettes or a nicotine vape depends purely on the person playing the game. A gambling addict could easily see this as their nicotine vape, and it could easily prime kids for casinos.
So then explain why games with actual real money gambling aren’t rated 18+, is gambling “imagery” with no gambling really that much worse than having actual gambling?
Ask PEGI why loot boxes aren’t rated 18+, I’m not defending them.
These games not only have poker in the name, they are literally casino sims, and you play against other players:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/384180/Prominence_Poker/
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP2070-CUSA01104_00-UPUREPOKER000001/
Both pegi 12. Your argument is flawed.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Yahtzee uses “valid poker hands” and dice for scoring too. They sell that in toy stores.
Yatzhee is dice. It uses combinations of numbers. They turn into points. Before you make any other ridiculous comparisons the idea is to perform to standard. Not to lower the standard. Gambling is a serious addiction and making games about it is a serious issue.
Yatzhee is dice.
So is craps, one of the most popular casino games on the planet.
You can’t gamble with dice?
If you want to be reductive everything is gambling. Even your birth.
I mean the kinds of gambling that might trigger someone with a gambling addiction. Isn’t that where you were coming from?
I played Yahtzee once and now I hustle back alley Craps foe drug money.
I’m happy to lobby for the balatro dev once he posts on a federated media (real fed, not bluesky).
Personally, I don’t care if balatro is popular here, the pegi 18 rating will impact sales 0%. Also, FC24s gambling should be banned EU wide or the rating of the game should be upped to 18+. Better yet, we should use this Balatro slip up from PEGI to get FC24s rating to be revised to 18+
Personally, I don’t care if balatro is popular here, the pegi 18 rating will impact sales 0%.
I don’t doubt that some weird ultra religious family will ban Balatro in their house because of that.
They haven’t understood the game at all, I wonder if they even looked at it for more than two minutes
Run game > see playing cards and poker chips > close > PEGI 18
Ah, but there are also tarot cards, which is spooky Occult voodoo magic. Balatro backwards might spell “Satan is Lord” in some ancient druidic script.
Praise Otralab!
* ortalaB
They’re not looking into blatant gambling in AAA titles, of course they won’t take a closer look into an indie game. They’re completely useless.
It can’t be that easy. PEGI says that games containing gambling (real money or not) are rated with PEGI 12 to 18. So there must be something else to the game that led to this rating.
or…you know… they’re just morons.
Maybe winning a game award while being solo developer studio, it feels like this to me
Wait, wasn’t this already an issue a while back and wasn’t that resolved?
It was banned by a few countries for looking like a gambling game which was a separate thing, now it’s just rated as an adult game by PEGI.
Right - I was thinking of the brief store pull.
But I thought that got resolved with the game getting the 18+ PEGI rating back in March already?
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/03/balatro-back-on-switch-eshop-in-europe-with-new-age-rating
Or was it like a provisional rating?
I still wonder why the hell is this game classified as a roguelike? It’s poker mixed with MTG. Also, why are you crying dude? You made a literal slot machine.
It has rouge features of building up a lot of utility in each run
Semi-permanency is not a defining feature of roguelikes, in most of them every run starts from scratch.
That’s why he said roguelite. Semipermanency (being able to unlock upgrades for future runs) is what separates the roguelite from a roguelike. In a roguelike, every run you start from 0, in a roguelite you unlock things that make differences in future runs (in the case of balatro: different decks, new jokers, …)
Examples:
Hades is a roguelite.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike.
No, rouge is the stuff that ladies put on their cheeks. You mean rogue, as in wildcard, untameable, privateer.
Yes thank you
Why is he still using Twitter? Does he want a bunch of Nazis replying to him?
Because, unfortunately, millions of people still use it. If you’re selling a product, it’s in your best interest to have as much social media presence as possible.
Also, it’s better to have an official presence on those platforms so others can’t impersonate you as easily.
Then there should also be a version of the post on Mastodon, and this post should be a screenshot of that one.
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If you’ve ever made a thing that took so much time that it has to be your job, and earn you money, you’d likely have a different view. If you’re ignoring a percentage of your target market because they’re on a platform you don’t like, then your project might fail, and you don’t get to keep your house.
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If your stated downside to still using Twitter is that it’s a waste of time, is that invalidated if your posting tool posts to all of your socials with one click? Like most professional social media users that have to maintain a bunch of channels with the same content?
Also, who is being dramatic about how important it is to be on or off twitter?
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Ok… but his thing can actually happen… your version of the bad things that can happen for still also posting news to twitter is all imaginary stuff that doesn’t happen in real life. Being upset about the direction Twitter and Reddit took and are taking is a totally valid, and honestly the objectively correct position to have about it. But adding in imaginary penalties for using it is not.
Twitter can reach various community from variety of region, like English Asia Twitter.
Entire fediverse is still mostly Western community.
Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.
Also, the simple fact is that there is no reason that any entity promoting their product has to choose any of these platforms over the other–you can just post to all of them, every single one that has enough users to be worth posting to.
I’ve seen several small creators say they get 10 times the engagement on Bluesky. That includes sales through promo links, which can’t be faked. It’s becoming clear that X’s numbers are mostly illusory at this point.
let’s just do like all parents buying the last Call of Duty to their 10-year-old and just don’t give a fuck about PEGI.
The thing is, this is likely going to affect their sales to some degree.
As a parent, you may have age lock on your child’s account, or search games by rating, or just not know what this game is when asked to buy it but judging by rating.I don’t know how significant of an impact that is, but it’s unfair.
I think they’ve done them a favour in a way. If this was day one then it might hurt them but they’re past the point of like 90% of their sales I bet, and now pegi looking like incompetent dinosaurs is just a free second wave of social media exposure
One of the big advantages of steam and online storefronts in general is that it bypasses PEGI / ESRB and their unnecessary Draconian nonsense.
Fuck PEGI, their ratings always sucked and weren’t useful at all. Full blown swearing? 13+. One cigar through 500 hours of gameplay? Adults only. Never cared, never will.
Violence and gore? 13+. Some boobs? Adults only.
Killing good, love bad.
And people pretend that only American ratings systems pull this kind of bullshit.
If anybody knows about love it’s rimjob_rainer.
Might as well go all in on that new rating.
Balatro 1.5 Patch Notes.
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All the Jokers now hang dong.
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Big naturals Queens are worth double.
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NBA 2K literally had slot machine in it. System is corrupt.
Hngh. Balatro already had a bunch of hassle on Switch eShop due to the PEGI ratings change.
Earlier, Nintendo somehow got a PEGI 12 rating for 51 Worldwide Games, which includes poker and blackjack. I wonder what they argued to avoid the 18 rating. “Sure, this compilation has poker and blackjack, but it’s not like we made it fun.” (It’s adequate but compared to Balatro it’s very much a non-frills experience.)
“sure our game has gambling elements, but we’re Nintendo so shut the fuck up and give us a better rating because you’re a private company in the business of giving ratings”
I believe 51 Games came out right before the stricter PEGI policy. Same year at least. The whole thing is very silly.
Steer clear of clowns emojis, bub.
Balatro is a hard drug worse than heroin. We need to protect our kids from the bottomless pit of roguelite games
Thank God it’s ten dollars.
I almost downloaded it.
If you’ve ever spent money on a movie theatre ticket, you value your time at $7-$20 dollars an hour. This… is thousands of hours of entertainment.
So, you’re suggesting we make games per hour subscription? A good idea /s
I’m not saying it’s not worth ten dollars.
I just don’t feel like spending ten dollars.
I’m hopelessly addicted to gatcha. When I saw this I bought Balatro.
