Balatro publisher Playstack only discovered it because they had a guy checking all the new releases on Steam every day: 'I saw the game the day it went up on Steam'

As part of a talk highlighted in the 2026 GDC Trends Report, Playstack head of discovery Patrick Johnson explained how the indie publisher got in on the ground floor with PCG's 2024 game of the year, Balatro. There's no shortcut or sexy secret, though, just putting in boring work with a dose of good old-fashioned stick-toitiveness.

"One thing that we do at Playstack is we scout," said Johnson. "We look at games across all sorts of platforms. Part of my job is looking at every game that goes up on Steam every day, if that’s possible.

"I start in the morning, and I’ll look through all of the games that have just gone up. That’s how we first came across games like Balatro. I saw the game the day it went up on Steam."

This would have been around May or June 2023 according to Balatro dev LocalThunk's own development timeline for the game. According to Johnson, Playstack wa...