Balatros

Balatro’s free 1.1 update won’t release in 2025 as originally planned, developer Localthunk has announced. There’s no new release date, but they say the update’ll arrive when they’ve been able to complete it, while continuing to work at a healthy pace.

This update was first announced by publishers Playstack in August last year, with Localthunk subsequently revealing in a chat with Bloomberg that it’ll feature, among other stuff, some new jokers and a revamp of the Matador card. The latter dishes out a cash boost whenever you play a hand that triggers a boss blind’s ability.

In a blog post about the decision to delay the update, Localthunk wrote that it all comes down to wanting to ensure they keep on taking care of their health and desire to keep on developing the roguelike deckbuilder in the way they work, as you can read below:

The truth is that I probably shouldn’t have announced any date for the 1.1 update at all. I’m a hobbyist developer at heart and I love to tinker. If you read my blog post about the Balatro timeline, you’ll know that since the game went public in the summer of 2023 I have become all too familiar with the crunch and stress that inherently come with professional game development. The struggles of pre-launch are detailed in that blog post, but unfortunately it didn’t stop at launch. Immediately after Balatro 1.0 came out in February 2024 I dove right in to a big balance patch (1.0.1), then into the mobile port of the game right after, and by the time the mobile version came out in late 2024 I was well and truly burned out.

I took a break from everything to do with the game for a few months until the start of 2025 when I very slowly eased myself back into the work. However, I chose to only work on the game like I did when the project began, as a hobbyist (a few hours per day, and not always on the 1.1 update), and it turns out that it’s a lot slower than working in crunch mode 12 hours per day like I was around launch.

So, they now plan to keep on working at that slower cadence. “Balatro 1.1 will still come out, of that I am certain, but the new timeline is going to be it’s done when it’s done,” the developer explained, “It will be a free update for everyone on all platforms when it’s ready, and it’ll probably need some adjustments when it’s out there in the world (like 1.0 did), but that won’t be this year.”

I’m glad to see Localthunk putting their health and happiness above all else. After all, given that Balatro’s well-earned (not just because it led Edwin to have to write about boobs) and rampant popularity isn’t going to evaporate into nothingness anytime soon, there’s no sense in trying to rush 1.1 out. Folks will still be here for it further down the line, and ready to whip out their decks the moment it drops.

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