Indie publishers struggle to get noticed. While publishers behind AAA titles can generally rely on their prior reputation or bankable IP to attract the initial attention of players and media outlets, indie devs are simply happy to make it onto someone’s radar. For this reason, indie games depend heavily on word-of-mouth marketing, either via Steam reviews or online discourse like live-streaming chat rooms.
For this reason, indie publishers often focus on subgenres with high rates of engagement among fans to get that initial set of eyes on their game. Take simulator games for example, which have led to recent breakout hits like Supermarket Simulator and Fast Food Simulator. One of the biggest indie hits of last year was Balatro, earning both critical and commercial success and capitalizing on the demand for roguelike deckbuilders among indie game fans.
In this article, we’re looking at whether the demand for roguelike deck builders carries over onto live-streaming platforms, with a deeper dive into the particular success of Balatro.
Balatro Brings Indie Builders to the Fore
Balatro’s initial debut back in February of 2024 was phenomenal. After a month of word spreading, Balatro reached a peak of 4.3M monthly hours watched in March – a strong showing for an original-IP card game. But what’s more fascinating is how the game managed to bounce back, currently experiencing a second wave of popularity where other titles might have trailed off and been forgotten. In November, Balatro’s viewership started increasing again before nearly tripling up to 2.4M hours watched in December.
Balatro owes this renewed interest to its nomination for Game of the Year, announced on the 18th of November 2024. A large contingent of gamers had missed the initial wave of hype in February as they played newly released AAA titles (February has become a favourite launch month for highly anticipated AAA titles after the holiday period, like the upcoming Monster Hunter: Wilds). Even we at Stream Hatchet missed our chance to cover it, despite having covered every other GOTY award nominee. This nomination brought Balatro back to public attention and set off another wave of new players on Steam, as noted by PlayTracker. Naturally, live-streaming viewership soon followed as players looked for optimal strats to “beat” the game.
Looking at the streamers who fuelled this resurgence reveals some well-known names. Just examining top streamers by hours watched over the past three months, we see streamers like PirateSoftware (178K), Emiru (87K), and Vinesauce (49K). It’s nice to see streamers supporting titles based on their critical acclaim, since they more often tend to cover new games to cash in on hype. Roffle was the true supporter though, capturing viewer attention through both his Twitch and YouTube Gaming channels to bring in 303K hours watched.
Deck Builder Hype Rests Upon Just A Few Titles
For fans of indie games, the breakout success of a roguelike deckbuilder may not be all that surprising. After all, there’s a massive number of these titles churned out every year – especially since the popularity of Slay the Spire when it released back in 2017. There are a couple dozen deck builders that even have highly positive review ratings on Steam. To see if this popularity tracked onto live streaming, we analyzed a sample of the top 20 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam by all-time peak concurrent user count. Thanks primarily to Balatro, 2024 was a great year for the genre on live streaming with a peak quarterly watch time of 11.7M hours watched. One would expect this newfound love for the genre to carry over into 2025.
However, for now, it’s still early days. The fact of the matter is that, as far as live streaming is concerned, interest essentially rests upon just three titles: Balatro, Slay the Spire, and Inscryption. The next roguelike deckbuilder down, Across the Obelisk, sits at just one-fifth the viewership of Inscryption for 2024. For such a saturated genre, it’s possible that three titles are all that’s needed to capture the fanbase’s attention. Additionally, since these games are so easy to update, there’s little incentive to create a sequel, and therefore little franchisability.
As stated before, however, this could be set to change. First of all, Slay the Spire 2 is one of the most hotly anticipated indie games of 2025. Additionally, exciting new spins on the formula have already debuted in January of 2025, like the Mahjong-inspired Autoenjo: Infinite Hands and the soulslike/deck building mashup game Death Howl. Those are just a few exciting roguelike deck builders set to debut. Stream Hatchet will be watching eagerly for the next game to innovate and perhaps further grow this subgenre’s popularity on live streaming.
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