Despite the game featuring no actual betting of real-world money, the Pan European Game Information board (PEGI) has ruled that due to its “prominent gambling imagery”, the deck-building rogue-like Balatro deserves an official “Adults Only” rating of 18+.
According to PEGI’s official rating, this rating is based on the organization’s belief that the fan-favorite card “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,” says PEGI. “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.”
As noted above, this gambling-based rating was given to Balatro despite the fact that it does not feature any gambling. Players cannot dictate how many chips they bet, they can only play poker hands to beat the Blind (target score)- relying on jokers and modified cards to improve how the hand is scored, what cards are in the deck, how often they can discard their hand, how many hands they can play, and so on and so forth.
The only ‘risk’ players take are related to what cards to discard, what strategies to pursue, when to reroll the cards available for sale, and the given use of a card’s special effects.
Taking umbrage with not just PEGI’s decision, but their hypocrisy, Balatro creator LocalThunk (the one-man dev team has never shared his real name with the public) took to his Twitter after receiving the news to express his frustrations with the entire situation.
“Since PEGI gave us an 18+ rating for having evil playing cards maybe I should add microtransactions/loot boxes/real gambling to lower that rating to 3+ like EA Sports FC” he balked.
Further declaring “This is comedy,” LocalThunk then shared the links to PEGI’s ratings for Balatro and the thus far two entries in the EA Sports FC series, in doing so inviting players to compare the fact that they gave his offline, single-player, microtransaction free title an 18+ rating while the sports games, which “offers players the opportunity to purchase in-game items, in the form of an in-game currency, which can be used to purchase random card packs and other game items,” was given a free pass with a 3+.
Offering clarification to his initial thoughts, LocalThunk later told his fans, “Just to clear it up – I’m way more irked at the 3+ for these games with actual gambling mechanics for children than I am about Balatro having an 18+ rating.”
“If these other games were rated properly I’d happily accept the weirdo 18+,” he explained. “The red logo looks kinda dope.”
Offering an update on the situation three days later, LocalThunk revealed that his efforts to appeal the board’s decision had ultimately proven unsuccessful.
“Talked with PEGI and they do not see anything wrong Balatro being rated 18+, nor with EA sports FC (and similar games) having a 3+ rating,” he lamented. “Blaming EU laws, blaming storefronts, waiting for the future. Sitting on their hands. I thought some good might come of this, this sucks.”
The official Balatro X account also shot back at PEGI’s decision.
Speaking via the persona of the game’s resident jester Jimbo (who recently made his live-action debut in the trailer for the game’s upcoming Friends of Jimbo expansion, as portrayed by Final Fantasy XVI‘s Ben Starr), the clown workshopped the possibility of some new insults, as afforded to him by their new rating, that he could use when players inevitably lose their next run.
“So when can I drop my 1 designated F-bomb?” asked Jimbo “I’m thinking ‘If I had hands, I’d cover my f-ing eyes’. Or ‘The house always f-ing wins'”.
It seems against PEGI however, the house f-ing doesn’t, unless its called a loot box.
Back in 2017, PEGI claimed that in regards to lootboxes, “we cannot define what constitutes gambling. That is the responsibility of a national gambling commission.”
While the EU itself has demanded consumer protection laws, such as the requiring of disclaimers indicating if game has loot boxes, along with a public detailing of their odds, some individual nations have opted to wash their hands of the matter completely by declaring total bans on loot boxes either all together, as done by Belgium, or in games that full under younger age ratings, as demonstrated by Spain and Germany.
