It's not easy being a non-Baratro player in a horde of enthusiasts. They say things like, "You have a duplicate joker that produces 4x in the same hand and a duplicate joker that produces 4x in a forking hand," or "If you want to scale such a build, you basically need a red seal on every face card, and then everything repeats," and what the heck is going on! I can't help but just sit quietly and wonder what is going on. It's a lonely feeling sometimes. [Balatro, a poker-themed roguelike deck builder, encourages a level of cheating that would break a finger in any respectable casino. And they're not alone: publisher PlayStack announced yesterday that the game has sold over 500,000 units across all platforms in just 10 days

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That's a very big number for such a small game: Balatro was created by one developer, who goes by the name LocalThunk, but he doesn't play poker at all. Technically, it's not even a poker-based game: LocalThunk recently told me that Balatro is based on a game called Big Two.

What makes this accomplishment even more surprising is that Balatro was pulled from digital storefronts in several countries after its PEGI rating jumped from 3 to 18+ because of its "gambling image." Since "Baratro" sold 250,000 copies in just the first few days of its release, one would imagine that the total number of copies sold was not significantly affected, but any little thing can help and in some cases hinder.

The 500,000 units is not the only major milestone that Balatro has achieved recently, as LocalThunk on his Twitter account stated that players have already poured a total of 1,114 years into the game. People certainly like Baratro.

Incidentally, Balatro is available on the Xbox and PlayStation stores in the UK and Europe with an 18-year-old rating, but remains delisted on the Nintendo eShop outside North America. (It remains E10+ with the ESRB in North America.) Playstack announced earlier this week that it is working on the issue.