Video Games

Awards may be meaningless, but a new surge in Balatro earnings proves that they can do good

Nominations at The Game Awards are doing good work for the game

Marco Wutz

LocalThunk

Games don’t become better or worse by being nominated for prestigious awards or missing out on them, but they can still benefit from self-indulgent industry shows in a very practical way. The latest sales numbers for Balatro, as analyzed by PocketGamer.biz, are a fantastic example.

Balatro’s mobile version is a premium purchase, which means you pay a one-time fee of $9.99 USD or however much the game costs in your region and can then enjoy the title without further microtransactions or ads disrupting your experience. Of course, this means that the sales curve should start strong – and it did – and then slowly ebb down to a stable level of long-term sales – and that, too, seemed to be the case.

However, Balatro’s nominations in several categories at The Game Awards have disrupted this cycle in a positive way: Immediately after the announcement of the TGA 2024 nominees, stores saw an uptick in Balatro sales on iOS and Android. People who’d not heard of the game or were not interested in it before the nominations flocked to the App Store and Google Play Store to find out why the title secured spots in so many award categories.

This effect ensured that the days after which the nominations were revealed became Balatro’s second highest-grossing week on mobile stores since it was released there – only launch week was bigger.

In total, the game is estimated to have made over $4.4 million from its mobile version by now – a mighty result for an indie game with a premium business model.

Whatever one thinks of awards in general and The Game Awards in particular, this development is a tangible, positive result of their existence.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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