How one Canadian indie video game blew up — and what it says about the industry

This past year was filled with highs and lows for the video game industry. There was a labour strike, mass layoffs and controversies around diversifying the gaming world. But there were also long-anticipated new releases from big franchises and surprise indie successes from smaller developers. 

With so much to watch, celebrate and play, video game critics Jonathan Ore and Camille Salazar Hadaway join guest host Ali Hassan to talk about how 2024 played out in their industry. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Ali: A Canadian poker game, Balatro, took home the best independent and best mobile game at this year's Game Awards. Jonathan, tell me, why is this so exciting? 

Jonathan: I think it was really fun because Balatro is not really the kind of game you see get a whole bunch of honours at The Game Awards. It's not a gigantic high budget game, it's not something with multimillion, billion dollars Unreal Engine 5 graphics. It's a very simple card game at its core. It's also amazing that an independent game was nominated alongside huge games for Game of the Year, like it was alongside an Elden Ring expansion, a Final Fantasy game. It was really the little indie game that could. Canadian representation is always appreciated at The Game Awards, considering that Europe, Japan, the United States have such a huge presence at The Game Awards. 

Ali: Balatro also has a very, very interesting origin story. Can you tell us a little bit about how this game came to be? 

Jonathan: There's not a ton we know. The creator, a single creator who goes by the name LocalThunk, we don't know his real name, he has never gone really public in any of his interviews. The idea is that he had been working on some other things at the time, but thought he would just make a fun card game for, like, six friends a few years ago. He didn't really have any idea that it would become such a huge thing once it came out. It's just a really great small creator story of a game like this just blowing up and everybody in the game space just really acknowledging what an incredible amount of design went into this game, against the waves of like gigantic blockbuster, triple-A games. 

Ali: And to further this, he doesn't have any interest in it being a huge blockbuster. He doesn't want it to be in the casinos, which is so indie and Canadian at the same time. 

Jonathan: I should just mention that LocalThunk is so against making it a game with micro-transactions or real money gambling elements. He actually says he wrote it into his will that — even after he's passed — the game will never be turned into a gambling game. 

Ali: Wow. Camille, why is Balatro such a fun game to play?

Camille: I think the reason why it stands out, it's the standard 52-card deck that you start off with. But then you could also add enhanced 52-deck cards. So it's familiar, I think, for a lot of people that may not be used to video games and more virtual card games, but it is not necessarily, like Jonathan said, a gambling game. It has elements of virtual card games, like Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, where deck building is a huge part of that, and figuring out what deck works for you in different situations is important. So it's a lot of strategy that plays into it. 

And again, it is that classic example of word of mouth. When this game was starting, you had the developer that just put this out on Reddit: "Hey, I created this game for some friends. Play it. Hopefully you have some fun." And people did have fun. It didn't have big marketing dollars, but the community really pushed it through word-of-mouth to make it as successful as it is. 

Ali: Bolatro was just one of the few indie games that we've seen make a splash. Why do you think that we're seeing more and more of these indie or auteur game designers publishing projects, finding success? 

Camille: The layoffs that have been happening in the industry for the past two, three years have also played into that. 

You see a lot of developers that are in-between homes at studios that are making these projects that are more passion projects. We hear a lot about tech companies like Google, who also has a lot of their employees just work on passion projects. Sometimes those are the ideas that actually do better than the corporate-driven ideas, and I think we're seeing that as well with the games industry and with indie developers as well. You have games like HELLDIVERS, who's technically an indie game that has fun and internalizes all the things we love about Starship Troopers, but it's caught the eyes of these huge publishers in Sony and PlayStation, and became a huge hit against all odds.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Amelia Eqbal.