The reasoning in question:
This game teaches - by way of images, information and gameplay - skills and knowledge that are used in poker. During gameplay, the player is rewarded with ‘chips’ for playing certain hands. The player is able to access a list of poker hand names. As the player hovers over these poker hands, the game explains what types of cards the player would need in order to play certain hands. As the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points. Because these are hands that exist in the real world, this knowledge and skill could be transferred to a real-life game of poker
So, this game teaches skills and knowledge that are used in poker. The skills in knowledge are limited to… playing and making poker hands. That’s it. Also, “as the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points” – is hilariously funny. The idea that knowledge of what a poker hand is is anything related to the dangers of gambling is ridiculous.
My thief archer build in Morrowind and Skyrim lead me to a life of thievery and now I’m serving a life sentence at maxium security prison. Very sound logic.
One “teaches” you to gamble, the other allows you to gamble. And the one that just teaches you has a higher rating. Crazy.
Totally his fault for not heeding the ancient warning.
Give a man a fish, you get PEGI 3+. Teach a man to fish, 18+ you sucker.
I know this is anecdotal but I’m now living in a ditch because of Balatro. I never gambled before in my life and all the poker knowledge Balatro me taught caused me to start extreme gambling and now I’m dead in a ditch.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Can’t. I’m a little too dead for pics
Yup that checks out. Say hi to Betty White for me!
Ok, I’ll believe you this time…
have some passerby take the picutres, you dummdumm
As the game goes on, the poker hands also get increasingly unrealistic and different from real poker including things like five of a kind, and a pair being worth more than a royal flush.
If you tried to take the skills you learn from balatro to a poker table you would get kicked out basically immediately.
I’ve never gambled, but I’m pretty sure if I got 1.630e11 chips at a casino, something bad would happen to me, the casino, and the economy if I cashed it out. I think that’s 84 billion chips…
Times are different now, there’s no more turning up in a ditch. If you start winning too often, they’re gonna keep an eye on you and try to determine if you’re cheating. If you’re not, they’re gonna ask you to leave and ban you from the casino before you can actually win anything significant — the justification given is that it’s their casino and they can refuse entry to whoever they want. If you are cheating, then you’re just going to jail.
It’s 163 Billion chips.
1.630e11 is the same as 1.630 x 10^11
Which probably wouldn’t be that bad for the economy, but it might bankrupt the casino, depending on the value of the chips.
Whoops, off by a bit, lol
I place a torn up joker on the table, a tarot card, a llanowar elf card, and a pair of threes
“So with my score multiplier basically I own the casino.”
The dealer frantically calls security
“This is worth eighteen bazillion chips. Here is five dollars.”
“I’m sorry, the Llanowar Elves are banned, you should keep up with the meta” Activates the Pot of Greed and draw two.
“Sir, you can’t bring stone slabs to the table and play them as if they were cards. Also, where did these glass shards come from?”
I had a run where I legitimately had to stop and compare the point values a Two Pair Vs. One Pair Vs. Straight Flush
And ONE PAIR wound up being the one with the highest point value…
I was still 600 dollars short of winning against the Boss Blind, ending my run
I keep pulling the hermit card out of my tarot deck, but it hasn’t doubled my money! Have I learned incorrectly??
I wonder what they rated Pavlov VR, ya know the FPS game in VR that forces you to handle guns the way they would in real life and is popular with ex-military because of their transferrable skills?
I mean that would definitely get an 18 rating, I’m not sure what you are meaning to say
It’s really dumb if you know the two games (poker and Balatro).
Poker is a game of incomplete information where you need one single higher ranked hand than your opponent per round. The stakes are money you bet that your hand is better. Bluffing is an important part of the game.
Balatro is mostly a game with complete information (apart from the order of remaining cards in your deck and certain bosses that flip your cards). You bet no money. There is no bluffing. Money does not correlate to chips. It is about the rating of your hand (poker has no rating, only relative ranking). You play multiple hands. You can’t fold. Bluffing doesn’t exist. Cards can be improved, ratings can be improved, the decks can look nothing like poker decks, etc.
Listen. If there’s a white man in charge and aren’t yourself a wealthy white man, you’re in for a bad time.
Did he try getting a friendly industry insider appointed to the regulatory body to “facilitate” ?
Tell me you are corrupted to the core, without telling me you are corrupted to the core.
I wish this trend would die out. Tell me your x without telling me your x is so fucking pretentious and annoying.
Pretentious though?
Pretentious - attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.
Yes.
You and I have wildly different associations with this construct.
To me it sounds like silly phrasing. Just another version of “doth protest”
Tell me you’re on the internet too much without telling me you’re on the internet too much.
What’s wrong with that ? The real world is faaaaar more insane
You and I are in the real world right now.
He’s JustAnIdiot. PlsIgnore.
Have you tried partnering with Disney and incorporating some Marvel/Star Wars IP into the Balatro Cinematic Universe? Perhaps selling your company to Ubisoft or Sony and letting their massive legal/lobbyist team take a swing at this? Perhaps you could just take a total end-run around the problem and release an edition that uses the Minor Arcana instead of standard poker cards?
I’m willing to bet PEGI was lobbied to push for that 18+ rating by ea and other publishers because balatro is taking revenue from them. They don’t get how a game without microtransactions is doing better than they are
No need to lobby, EA are the ones making the decision
Would love to see thr EFF branch out and take this on. Great opportunity to set precedence.
I recently played it. If anything I think it has a subtle anti-gambling message.
The more hands you play, the more you realize you can’t actually win without “cheating”
Play it like poker? Congrats, you’re fucked, you literally cannot win against the blind.
Stack the deck in your favor with creative use of Joker cards and a few dozen extra aces? The game becomes trivial
If the game teaches you anything it’s that if you play by the rules, the house will ALWAYS win.
I just played it last night, and then again today with my kids watching. I explained how the hands are scored, and they seemed to get the gist of it.
It has absolutely nothing to do with gambling. You don’t wager anything, there’s no opponents, and the terminology is all different, for example:
- blind - in poker, it’s a forced bet based on sitting position from the dealer; in Balatro, it’s where you’re at in the “level” (and only the “boss blind” is required)
- ante - in poker, it’s the minimum bet to participate; in Balatro, it’s the level you’re on
- hand - in poker, it’s the cards you are dealt, and you play them all; in Balatro, it’s a scoring action, and you only play a subset of your cards in a given “hand”
And so on. The only thing that’s actually similar is the hand scoring system, but you mess with that as well with buffs and whatnot. Balatro will make you a worse poker player, and not even teach you the rules.
I don’t think it’s anti-gambling, it has nothing to do with gambling. It’s like saying solitaire and blackjack are similar because they both use playing cards…
Why don’t people reach out to “Dirk Bosmans, Director General PEGI S.A.”?
PEGI isn’t a living creature. PEGI isn’t giving out biased ratings. It’s the people working there, and the person in charge. Actual people that actually exist here on this planet with us. “Talking” to a company is imaginary bullshit.
Baltaro devs may need to invest in gambling to earn enough money to bribe PEGI the way EA almost certainly does.
What do you mean, almost? EA is literally a member of Video Games Europe, the organization which manages PEGI.
So, we’re moving on from bribery and straight to conflict of interest?
This is the case for both PEGI and ESRB, they are insider operated organizations developed to skirt regulations in the form of ‘self governance’.
If you search for “poker” on PEGI’s site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold’em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.
It’s clearly market manipulation.
The thing you have to understand about PEGI is that they are mentally challenged.
Please don’t use folk’s medical condition as an insult.
You’d have to shut me up and push me out.
You shouldn’t, you’ve already lost enough allies. It has become very clear that cripples and hall monitors does not a majority make. I don’t believe in your ethical maxims of sensitivity and strict language policing.
I’m sure you think the celebrated George Carlin is a massive cunt, in duller words.
Bro, they politely asked you not to use potentially hurtful language in an open forum.
Is that really how you react in the real world of someone says “I don’t like that, please stop?” Because that’s some abuser-coded behavior right there
coded
You’ll never successfully change the world like this. This kind of language demonstrably does nothing for you. We all know you believe “the common clay” should shut up and speak through filters approved by you and yours. Fuck you.
Lose everything in the next 4 years.
Dude you realize English is not a static language right? You’re making an ass out of yourself.
changed it from the side of union men to the side of flamboyant, sensitive baristas.
Lol based
I know.
Most people see it. Few, except the opposition, point to it as a negative.
Partly because they become the opposition by pointing to it. Anyone bothered by the change regardless of their standpoint of taxes, regulation, and public services are labeled right wing and pushed to admit it. They might as well go vote for the billionaires’ cause if they don’t want to shut up about their problems with sensitive liberals, right? Right. So it seems that’s exactly what they did.
People don’t like people who tell them to shut up, sit down, and behave.
People don’t like people who get so offended that they kick you out.That becomes a problem when you treat the majority like that, and not just a minority of very misbehaved assholes.
Guess why “The One Joke” became so prolific? Some creatively gay progressives desperately wanted to push the majority to comply with a set of new very strange expectations and taboos, and went about it in an incredibly obnoxious, reckless way. It became a huge meme because a majority, not an extremist minority, thought it was weird, ridiculous, stupid, overconfident, pathetic, and probably a whole host of other things.
Mate, they made a joke. Kinda like the ones the celebrated George Carlin made.
That was not a joke. That was a serious request.
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Y’all bots?
Wow, I rarely expect to find comments like this on Lemmy. Keep it up!
The pathetic thing is games of the ilk of balatro and luck be a landlord (also OG peggle) are actually the kind of game that plays with your gambling impulses but in a healthy and fun way, these games should be celebrated for subverting the language of gambling to make something beautiful, how pathetic to have so little actual understanding of video games and yet have this kind of power to impact the industry.
I’ve always suspected I might be susceptible to gambling addiction so I stay out of casinos.
Instead, I go to the arcade. Which is like a low stakes child casino. Win a bunch of tickets and then either buy something stupid with them, or, just straight give them to some kid.
My point being, we’ve specifically constructed casino-like facilities for children and it’s regularly accepted, so why should Balatro be different?
Gambling at an arcade is exactly the same. All you’ve done is lower the stakes so hopefully it couldn’t affect you.
There’s a scam to steal money from kids in pretty much every grocery store near where I live. We call them claw machines.
Yeah how dare you pay $9.99 one time to gamble all you want! If you’re gonna get those dopamine hits, you better be spending real money at the tables!
First time I’ve seen someone mention Luck be a Landlord. Really fun game.
I want to see someone take an actual slot machine rip out all the evil bits and replace it with a computer running Luck Be A Landlord with custom flashing lights for when you win, the slot machine lever and all that stuff.
It would be pretty awesome
Actual gambling - 3+
Suggestion of gambling - 18+
The queen of hearts is inherently obscene, that’s why my copy of Alice in Wonderland is rated 18+
there are actual poker games that are rated lower than 18 too.
Clown world clown world
IRL poker cards from the dollar store - !
Doesn’t matter in the slightest.
me, age 12, San Andreas
18 is the highest rating. It’s equivalent to the ESRB “AO” rating, and many storefronts will not sell it, period.
Doesn’t matter to a kid with a phone and unlimited time and willpower. I know with 100% certainty, if I was 16 and wanted to play Balatro, I wouldn’t be talking to you, I’d have an .apk already.
Storefront? Lmao.
Piracy being the only way to get a game isn’t beneficial to the dev, and Balatro is the kind of game that deserves our money. It could have easily been jammed to the gill with paid boosts premium decks, etc, but instead, they just made a good game.
I went looking for a patreon or donation page… Guys who get hit with this should just go that route. He doesn’t have a general one up.
We can’t control the bullshit, but we can side-step it.
What does this mean practically? Are they not allowed to sell it some places anymore if it’s 18+?
Theoretically stores in Europe are forbidden from selling 18+ games to underage customers.
Practically, almost no one follows this. Although digital storefronts like Steam do, some parents do, and more importantly there could be age restrictions on Youtube and Twitch gameplays.
Maybe if they decide to make box copies of the game.
Is the rating purely because it uses playing cards? Poker hands?
Yahtzee and literal poker with betting are included in Nintendo clubhouse/worldwide 51 and it’s rated Pegi-12.
Would balatro get a pass if it used cards numbered 1-13 instead of traditional cards?
This whole thing is bonkers.
Anyone can walk into a store and buy a deck of cards.
I bet the gift shop of any casino in Las Vegas would sell a souvenir deck of cards to a kid without a second thought.
If it wasn’t for regulations, they’d happily let the kids shovel their money into the slots.
Used to do that all the time as a kid, but a slot machine taking 2 pence a time is a far cry from one where you give it your bank card and go ham.
Kmart and target both sell literal “poker kits” with decks of cards and chips with no restriction on who can buy it. In the toy section with the other board games no less.
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He’s Australian, Kmart is still fully operational in kangaroo land
The logical conclusion is that Australia isn’t just “down under,” it’s the underworld where call failed American chains go after they die.
Okay then, how does Hungry Jacks fit into that chain of logic?
Burger King just hasn’t died yet.
Well, the burgers are better at hungry jacks!
Let’s go to Venture!
