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 was still bullish on Steam wishlists as an indicator of a game’s potential sales and popularity, which makes its decision to support Balatro all the more surprising—it was a complete unknown. “I don’t think we believe they’re quite as important as they used to be,” Johnson said of Steam wishlists.
“Balatro came through on Steam, and it didn’t have many followers to begin with. It didn’t have many wishlists on the platform. But it looked interesting. We thought, ‘That’s a cool-looking game. We should reach out and just try it.’
“I went to Twitter at the time and contacted LocalThunk. I think he had maybe two or three followers at the time on the platform.”
Going by LocalThunk’s recollections, this was a pivotal moment for him and the game. “I got a DM on Twitter from a scout at Playstack, my eventual publisher,” LocalThunk wrote. “I was super excited, but this also complicated things. This was a very tumultuous time in the history of the game because I was in limbo between ‘Nothing will come of this game and I want to move on with my life’ and ‘What if I could do this as a job?'”
Someone else might have spotted Balatro’s potential and lent LocalThunk the resources and reach to quit his job and turn the game into a phenomenon, but that’s far from a guarantee. In this instance, no amount of discovery algorithms or manual curation could have substituted for Johnson just tanking the firehose of new games on Steam whenever he had the time. That busywork changed LocalThunk’s life and allowed our eventual 2024 game of the year to find an audience.
“We were in there really early. And I think that made the key difference,” said Johnson. “Obviously, I’d like to think we were a great partner for the game, but just the speed at which we could move out was very important for that time.”
In other news about Playstack, the publisher appears to have received an offer it can’t refuse from Integrated Media Company, a subsidiary of the private equity group TPG that owns the likes of Fandom, GameSpot, Curse, and TV Guide. Playstack’s current owner, TrueFin, is seeking approval of a $151 million deal to sell its majority stake to IMC.
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