Beyond Balatro and taking risks: Why Playstack doesn’t want a 100% hit rate

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In This Edition,
Playstack’s Harvey Elliott on…

• The impact of Balatro

• Its 85% hit rate

• Playstack’s new owners

• Taking risks

Indie publisher Playstack is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and yet the company’s name has arguably only been on everyone’s lips for a couple of years – thanks largely to poker-themed roguelike deckbuilder Balatro.

As with so many indie breakouts, the 2024 smash hit seemed to come from nowhere but Playstack CEO and founder Harvey Elliott says his team were confident long before the name ‘Balatro’ was making headlines.

“We knew we had something special,” he tells The Game Business Show. “Nobody knows how special that could have been, but there was such a buzz about the game, such excitement. We all had our dream forecasts for how the game might do – and we were all low.

“The game built the fervor for itself and we just gave it a voice, gave it an audience and some reach. But the game just really captivated imaginations and it made people feel very smart when you’re getting really good at combos and trying to work out the right way to put your jokers or prepare your deck.”

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Balatro not only provided Playstack with great success but also with valuable lessons; for example, Elliott believes the company could have created “a different kinds of moment” if it had released on PC, consoles and mobile simultaneously (as opposed to the latter arriving several months later).

“Those sort of lessons, like the launch planning, timing the game release, and getting it out there, and just little things about when you submit a game on multiple platforms all at once... We’ve done more complicated things since because of Balatro, but we didn’t necessarily do them all with Balatro first time. A multi-SKU release is complicated, especially with a solo dev driving the creative and driving the game.”

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Deck building

The biggest impact on Playstack has been developer perceptions of the company; perhaps inevitably, it has become cemented as ‘the Balatro publisher’ in the minds of many, which has in turn influenced the type of games it is pitched.

“Raccoin’s a really good example – they probably were inspired by Balatro,” says Elliott. “So Raccoin probably only existed because Balatro existed, and because we’d published Balatro, they had to bring it to us. So it created Raccoin in that way. We’ve had a surprising number of those parlor roguelike games being pitched to us, and we’ve got a couple more coming out. So yes, it sort of created a theme within the games, but that’s still a very small proportion of what we do – and really there only is one Balatro.”

It’s important to note that ‘the Balatro publisher’ is far from a one-hit wonder. Ten years in, the company has a hit rate of 85%, thanks to best-sellers such as Abiotic Factor, the Mortal Shell series, and mystery game The Case of the Golden Idol (plus its sequel and six DLCs).

“We are really proud of that,” says Elliott, “but the 15% is really important too, because if you only did things that were safe and profitable, you don’t take as many risks, and I don’t think indie publishing is about that. Indie publishing and development is about taking risks. It’s about having an idea that people just generally don’t quite see how [it would work], but it becomes phenomenal and captures people. 85% is a really nice number, maybe 70% would be brilliant too. But 100%, we’re probably making some mistakes in what we’re filtering out.”

He continues: “Indies can be quite fearless. Look at Color Gray Games and Case of the Golden Idol, which has a very distinctive 2D art aesthetic and a quite traditional old-school point and click-style gameplay... that could never be a AAA experience, because that’s a risk people have never taken, but it’s been really successful and led to a franchise.

“It could afford to be fearless because it didn’t have the world’s greatest expectation on it. With the bigger budgeted games, those risks are harder to take. You can still have exceptional games, but there is something quite refreshing about where indie games can go.”

New ownership, new opportunities

Playstack is now in a position to take even more risks, thanks to some new owners.

Back in May, the publisher was acquired by Integrated Media Company (IMC), the owner of Fandom and GameSpot, valuing Playstack at £125 million (or, as Ellliott prefers to say, “one eighth of £1 billion”). The CEO emphasises that nothing will really change – he has no earn-out or escape clause, and remains “as committed as ever to the business” – but the deal enables the indie publisher to explore the big question: where does it go next?

“It’s healthy for us to have a slightly bigger investor group that we can talk to about things, about new directions and things we’d like to do as a business,” he explains. “Everything in games evolves, so we’ve got to keep evolving with it. And they love us for who we are, so that’s a good thing, too.”

He adds: “We had a business plan signed off with [previous owner] TruFin at the end of last year, and that’s the exact same business plan we’ve adopted with IMC – delivering the exact same number of games, the exact same revenue opportunities. What it will change is if we have bigger appetites for some things in the future, we’ve got a lot more headroom with titles we might want to get behind and how we want to support games.

“We didn’t really test the limits of that with TruFin. We had really great support from them, but we were getting close to being quite a significant majority share of their business. So for us, having more headroom is very useful and very important. But we’re not changing the standards, the game selection process that we use, the way the team has to be passionate and get behind a game, the forecasting methodology we use – all of those things are still true.”

Does this mean there may be bigger games in Playstack’s future? Potentially, but Elliott stresses that they need to “make sure the numbers make sense for everyone.” The developers deserve to be profitable, and Playstack won’t spend extortionate amounts of money if it delays the point when anyone is earning royalties.

“We might have an appetite for some bigger games, but only if the numbers stack up,” he tells us. “And there are some growth opportunities for us as a business, where we think we could do more, and that was already part of our business plan. The constraint is on us and our ambition, not on how much money’s in the bank and what we are thinking. I’m always going to make sure we’re profitable with a great growth plan, but sometimes you’re funding projects for two, three years out, so you want to make sure you’ve got the cash flow for that.”

“Balatro led to Raccoin and there’s two more that we’ll be announcing later this year”

Crucially, this leeway and Playstack’s ongoing success enables the publisher to continue expanding its portfolio. That 85% hit rate isn’t driven by any single type of title, and Elliott is keen to ensure that remains the case.

“We aren’t a genre team,” he says. “We do have some games which happen to resonate around certain genres. That just happens. We had Case Of and Rise Of The Golden Idol, and we now have another detective-esque game we’re going to announce later this year. Balatro led to Raccoin and there’s two more that we’ll be announcing later this year. But we’re really a variety publisher in that our taste as players is all sorts of games, and we want to be able to publish all sorts of games.

“The portfolio will look its best when it’s varied and interesting with a diversified mixture of games inside it, and that portfolio will only build if we’re successful in publishing great games from creative developers.”

He concludes: “You asked what Balatro has changed about Playstack? It told us we’re doing the right things. It gave us that spring in our step. It has given us the ability to fund more projects and back more games and invest in more titles.

“We never want to be gigantic. We never want to be [in a position of] ‘oh, another week, another Playstack game’. That’s not who we are. We probably have eight releases this year, which is quite a lot. It’s busy. It’s healthy.”

Check out our full chat with Harvey Elliott above.