Balatro Got an 18+ Rating for Gambling While Loot Box Games Kept Their E for Everyone
In February 2024, Balatro launched on PC and consoles. A solo developer had spent two and a half years building a poker-themed roguelike deck builder with no real money involved, no microtransactions, and no loot boxes.
It sold a million copies in the first week. Shortly after launch, PEGI reclassified it from a 3+ rating to 18+ for prominent gambling imagery and briefly pulled it from sale in several regions.
At the same time, EA Sports FC was sitting comfortably on a PEGI 3 rating while selling randomised card packs for real money.
You could spend hundreds of pounds trying to pull a specific player, with no guarantee of success. That is not gambling imagery. That is gambling. The rating stayed at 3.
The contradiction was noticed immediately, and loudly. Playstack appealed the Balatro decision, and PEGI eventually walked it back to a 12+ rating, acknowledging that the fantasy context distinguished it from actual gambling.
But the whole episode was revealing about how inconsistently the industry handles risk, reward, and real money.
What Balatro Actually Is
Balatro uses poker hand rankings as the foundation of a scoring system. You build a deck, collect modifier cards called Jokers, and try to hit point targets across increasingly difficult rounds.
There is no betting, no house edge, and no way to spend money mid-run. The randomness is contained within a closed system that players can learn and influence.
It went on to sell more than seven million copies and win Game of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
A detailed breakdown of how Balatro's mechanics compare to actual gambling gamesis worth reading if you want to understand exactly where the line sits between poker-inspired design and real-money risk.
Luck Be a Landlord, the slot-machine roguelike that Balatro credits as its biggest influence, had a similar run-in.
Google Play nearly banned it in early 2025, sending the developer an automated notice that the game contained gambling.
The game involves no money changing hands at any point. The developer eventually gave up appealing and accepted the inaccurate classification just to keep the game available.
Where the Real Thing Looks Nothing Like the Game
Part of what makes this debate interesting is how different actual online slots are from the sanitised, skill-inflected versions that indie games borrow from.
Balatro and Luck Be a Landlord take the visual vocabulary of casino gaming and use it to build games where player decisions genuinely matter. The randomness exists but you can shape it, counter it, and learn to work with it.
Real online slots are built on a different foundation. The outcomes are determined by certified random number generators that no amount of skill or strategy can influence.
What game designers at studios like Pragmatic Play have focused on instead is how the experience feels during play: the tumble mechanic that chains wins together in a cascade, the progressive multiplier that builds across a single spin, the Bonus Buy feature that lets you skip straight to the high-variance round if you choose.
Those mechanics are genuinely interesting as game design, even if the underlying math is fixed. The themes range from Greek mythology in Gates of Olympus to candy-coloured chaos in Sweet Bonanza, and the volatility profiles vary significantly between titles.
Some pay out small wins frequently, others sit quiet for long stretches and then hit large.
If you want to understand what the real-money version of this genre looks like rather than the indie abstraction, a thorough overview of pragmatic play slots covers the most played titles from one of the UK's most widely available studios, how their mechanics work, and what the experience of each game is like.
It is a useful reference point for anyone curious about where the genuine product sits relative to the games that borrow its aesthetic.
Why the Rating Boards Keep Getting This Wrong
The Balatro situation exposed a gap in how regulators think about gambling-like mechanics. PEGI and the ESRB were built to evaluate content, not economic models.
A game that looks like a casino triggers their filters. A game that charges money for randomised rewards in a sports kit does not, because it has been carefully designed to avoid the specific visual markers they watch for.
The indie developers making Balatro-adjacent games are largely not trying to exploit anyone. LocalThunk, who built Balatro alone over two years, has gone out of his way to highlight other small developers and avoid the attention that came with the game's success.
The irony is that his game got the gambling warning while the products that function most like gambling kept their child-friendly ratings.
The Bigger Picture for Game Designers
What Balatro demonstrated is that the psychological hooks of gambling, the escalating stakes, the variable rewards, the feeling of a system that can suddenly pay off big, make for compelling game design when the real-money element is removed.
The game works precisely because it gives players genuine agency over a system that looks chaotic but rewards understanding.
That is a lesson game designers have been absorbing. Buckshot Roulette reached eight million players before it even came to consoles.
CloverPit, Raccoin, and a growing catalogue of gambling-aesthetic roguelikes have followed Balatro's template. The mechanic is not going away.
