LocalThunk’s Balatro arguably became the defining indie game of 2024, chewing through its players’ available hours with a novel yet incredibly deep roguelike spin on playing poker hands. The game eventually won the Best Debut Game award at this year’s BAFTAs.
For publisher Playstack, it’s a huge success, and the most high-profile of several in recent years.
Soulslike Mortal Shell and Steam Early Access survival game Abiotic Factor each reached significant sales milestones, while the two Golden Idol mystery games have drawn both critical acclaim and commercial success. Playstack saw revenues climb 455% in 2024.
Among its next titles are the rhythm action game Unbeatable, the pixel art survival game Lorn Vale, and the FPS Void Breaker.
GamesIndustry.biz speaks to Playstack CEO Harvey Elliott to discuss the company’s publishing strategy, whether Balatro changed the way it does business, and whether it makes sense for indie publishers to still chase trends in 2025.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
A lot of players think of Playstack as the Balatro publisher now, even though you’ve had a number of successive hits. Has it changed the company? Is there a before and after Balatro for Playstack?
Not really changed us, so much. More validated everything we’ve been trying to do for the last nine years.
We’ve actually had – as you’ve correctly identified – quite a number of games that have done well for us. Balatro has been a changer for Playstack, but it’s also been a changer for the industry.
I think it’s really shown, once again, [that] when great, highly captivating games come to market, it doesn’t matter if it’s made by one person or a hundred people.
They can reach audiences in new ways. It’s what we set out to make, and the kind of game we set out to find with Playstack.
What has changed for us is that it’s given us a bit of confidence – or a bit more confidence. It’s great to get reinforcement of the sorts of games we look for and the strategy we’ve set out on.
To change the perspective a tiny bit: we’re less concerned about whether we’re doing the right thing. We see [that] we’re doing the right thing, we see we can publish games in the right way. What we don’t want to get is complacent, [and] we don’t want to change who we are.
‘We aren’t saying that now we only do big games, that we only do games that are going to sell multi, multi-millions’. It’s a byproduct – we’d love to sell multi-millions of copies of all our games, but what we actually want to do is find amazing games from brilliant indie developers and give them their best potential and their best life.
What is it about the way you do business that you think still sets you apart from other publishers?
I think we’re very personal in the way we work with people. And it doesn’t mean ’boutique’ or tiny, it means that when we pick a game that we’re going to back, we’re very diligent about what we’re choosing to work with.
We want to make sure we’re going to add to the game and give it the best life, give it the best potential, reach the best audience with it.
And we want to go deep with the game. We want to work really closely with the developer on bringing their vision to life, and making sure all the things they think make their game special and exceptional are the things that we can bring to the fore in the market.
But also, if we think the market is going to resist some of the things they’re putting forward, let’s give them a good heads-up early on that there are challenges.
[Since] we don’t publish 20 or 30 games at once, we’ve got time to spend going into the details with each of the developers we work with, and I think that will always be a big part of what we do.
Image credit: Playstack
Balatro seems likely to result in even more of a push for roguelike deckbuilders. Do you think pursuing trends works as a strategy for indie publishers in 2025?
Obviously trends give people ideas in an area. If you’re just taking a game that’s there and making an alternative version of it, you’re not adding anything. You’re not making the space or sector or genre any bigger.
We do see games that are adding to a category, but iterating within it, and bringing new things in. There is definitely room for more roguelike deckbuilders in the world, but I wouldn’t make that the only thing we’d look for.
We signed two games [last] week – neither of them are roguelike deckbuilders. So, there are plenty of great games out there not in that space.
When there’s a success, of course, [there’s a] fast follow: “We must go chase that opportunity.” But a lot of people will start to chase that, and unless they’re doing something genuinely innovative, they’re not going to move that space forward anyway. They’re going to be a subset of what’s already there.
Playstack publishes games across different genres by design – you don’t have one or two specialties. What is the unifying element between your different games?
Great games that we are passionate about. I speak for a lot of game players here: we don’t play one genre of game, or just watch one genre of TV, of one genre of movie… We have broad and varied tastes.
Playstack is deliberately about great games – so if the game’s great, enjoyable and fun, and we’ve got somebody on the team who’s passionate about it, and we can work out who that game would be for, and how we can reach them, then it doesn’t matter what the genre of the game is.
There are publishers, who probably quite rightly, focus on specific, very technical categories, and they focus on areas where they can build real expertise.
From our perspective, we believe we’re the best publisher for all of the games we’ve signed, and all the games we offer on.
We had two rules when I started Playstack, which were ‘no extreme horror’ and ‘no American football’. The extreme horror is because my kids were really young, but that was nine years ago, and they’re now old, and they watch scarier stuff than I do, so horror is on the table.
But no one has got into American football yet, so we’re not doing that.
Can you talk about extending the success of Balatro post-release? How long do you see the tail on that game being?
There are a number of games that break through, that do phenomenally well, and Balatro is clearly one of them. We can see a lovely engaging future for that game, but we’re not trying to map out the life of the game for the next ten years. That’s not what we want to focus on.
We want to make the best decisions for the game for this year, for next year, to make sure that it’s reaching the right players, that it continues to be a great and delightful experience. But we have to be deliberately very respectful: the game works because of the way it is, because of the design of it.
At some point there will be an update which adds more to the game, but we don’t want to rush that, we don’t want that to be locked into a date. We want it to be a genuinely nice update; it doesn’t automatically mean big or huge. It just needs to be a really great way of taking that forward.
But it would be wrong of us to say, ‘this is what it looks like for the next five years from the game side’.
Our job as a publisher is to make sure it reaches as many players in the best possible way, and that every version of the game that comes out – [like] the way we’ve brought it from PC to console to mobile – feels like it was made for that platform.
The game has got a good tail to it. It will continue to do well – we’ve just got to shepherd it carefully.
Does the success of a game like Balatro or Abiotic Factor put a lot of pressure on your discovery team to find the next hit? Has their success changed the types of games you’re able to sign?
The latter, yes, the former, no. So, [the] discovery team, of course they’ve got to go find the next Balatro, but we’re also happy if they find the next Case of the Golden Idol, or the next Abiotic Factor. Those are the games we should be finding.
What we look at is, in the category we think they’re operating in, what’s the potential? What’s the ceiling? Out of all of the games we’ve published, I think we only have one game that hasn’t made, or isn’t paying royalties back to the development team yet, out of [around] 20 titles.
The discovery team’s job is to find great games. They have to think about which games Playstack can make a difference for, so that we’re working with a developer, and we’re growing the size of the market and potential of the game because we’re involved.
I can guarantee you it hasn’t changed what we’d try and sign, because I know the two games we signed earlier [last] week, and they are true to Playstack.
Has the pipeline changed as a result of your recent successes?
What we’re really looking at is how we use our time and skill to the best effect, and if that means we’re doing two games this year and they’re going to be phenomenal, we’ll do two games this year. But, more likely, our number is between six and eight, and I think it’s going to be in that sort of range for the next few years.
That was always the case prior to Balatro. What I think we’re doing slightly differently is, we’ve signed up almost everything for 2026 now.
We could probably fit in one more game, but I know how we’re going to make the plan work for 2026, and we’re looking at 2027. And so, Balatro has helped lift our horizon up, because we’ve attracted the games we wanted a little bit earlier perhaps, which means 2026 is pretty much put together now.
We try and keep just a little bit of capacity, in case we see a game that makes us go, ‘oh my goodness, there’s a game we should be doing’. And [then] we figure out how to do that.
What do you think the opportunity is on Switch 2 in terms of new releases and your catalogue?
I really like the platform. It’s not a revolutionary games console – it’s a really nice iteration forward, and I think there will be some really nice iterations to our catalogue for the platform. We’re probably not going to chase platform exclusives, a game that only works on Switch 2. Certainly the line-up we’ve got suits a variety of platforms.
We have a lot of content that is PC and PC-centric. But I think it’s still an exciting platform that we should do a little bit more on to make sure we iterate the games that suit the platform.
So, we will be supporting Switch 2, of course. We’re going to do the right things with our games on the platform, and we’re excited about it.
It’s three weeks away. Once we see it and play it in detail, I’m sure it’ll spark [our] imagination. It’s not revolutionary hardware, and it’s not going to change the way games are played – it’s just another nice way to extend experiences.
This article was updated for clarity on Playstack’s revenue percentage growth year-on-year. A quote has also been corrected.
