Chebucto Regional Softball Club

> I do worry a little about future antitrust actions, because while I generally like Valve as they are, Gabe won’t be around forever. They have a giant influence in the market, and they don’t even have to try (they were one of the first, so it makes sense they’d have the most market share); it could be that the company I generally like starts actively being anticompetitive or starts donating to Nazis or something. Agreed, if there's one potential weak point... it's basically that valve is the 15 years ago google of gaming right now. Great support for open source and linux... mostly good policies (minus maybe their micro transaction and lack of cracking down on how say the CSGO skins feed an underage gambling industry). But yeah, effectively we still have the worse of positions that, one bad management choice, and we could all lose access to all the games we've purchased from them over the last decade or 2.

> The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”. Yeah, I would say "playing 100% optimally is at least fair to look at, but if by known RNG, you can know things like say what joker will be negative if you take the skip blind, or what what will show up if you reroll the shop or open a pack, then that's such a huge advantage it doesn't even deserve to be part of the comparison. IE making zero mistakes would be a fair comparison... IE if you always take the move that has the highest odds of success with the information a player has, but counting decisions based on avoiding something with a 99% chance of success because the player knows it will be in the 1% is crazy bad way to grade something.

> Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it, but wasn’t blown away by it. I think you and I are probably similar in that. I'd say I really enjoyed about 20 hours of it, then played an additional 30 hours where I was hoping things would start getting fun again, but it never came. Ignoring the video Slots scoring, and poker themes. I would still say luck is so much stronger in balatro then on any roguelike I've played. To the extent that the best "strategy", is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don't show up before the ante outpaces you. In short, psudo-gambling mechanics are IMO largely what hooks people in the game, which I also have to say the PEGI group may actually be if anything slightly underestimating the risk. IE the game is 100% not gambling, but it draws on everything in the brain that gambling does. "Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further". I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there's a reason why there's such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics. Balatro IMO leans into all of the hook on gambling tropes, just avoiding the last step of exploiting it to get users to continue to pay them money. It's actually a pretty reasonable question to ask... does it put kids/teenagers into a mindset that will make them more vulnerable to a less ethical game developer that takes that last step.

IMO the gambling themes are the selling point of balatro. Hell ignoring the poker half, the dev's themselves basically said the whole scoring theme etc... was made to be slot machine style gameplay. To be honest I think that's a very large percentage of it's popularity, is just that viewpoint making it accessible to, non gamers and non roguelike fans. I don't think it would be a top seller if done as a "slay the spire", or done with a theme that doesn't have appeal to non-gamers. Also I would say, balatro is like 2 or 3 very minor changes away from easily being a "suck crazy amount of money from gambling addicts" game. IE if someone took balatro, released it on mobile platforms as f2p. Only differences being to slightly increase the speed of the anti score. and say start each game with 2 optional joker packs (for $1 chose between one of 3 random negative jokers), for $2 chose one of 5 negative jokers). (obviously replacing the dollar amounts with purchasable in game currency). You'd easily get into top mobile apps and make a killing.