Like most people, I've been lured in by the siren song of LocalThunk's not-gambling rougelite hit of 2024. I've been bitten by the Balatro bug. I don't think I need to explain what Balatro is at this point, but needless to say, it's fun and I've been having a great time.
Recently, I made a video on the game that got WAY more popular than it had any right to. At the time of writing it sits at around half a million views, outperforming my other most popular video by two orders of magnitude. It's one of those times you make a little thing for fun, not expecting it to go anywhere, and suddenly it blows up in popularity.
Except, here, that's not quite what happened.
At some point I got to thinking, what would happen if I played a hand with every Joker in the game at once. It's a pretty natural idea to draw once you're familiar with how the game works. I'd been dabbling in modding the game and figured it wouldn't be too hard to throw a little mod together to try it out.
At the same time, I had another thought. That sort of thing sounded exactly like a YouTube video I could imagine popping up in my recommended. "I played a hand of Balatro with every Joker at once!!" It was short, kinda clickbaity, easy to understand, and Balatro's UX is inherently very attention-grabbing.
I searched and couldn't find any other videos doing the same thing, so I figured I'd try making it myself. I did end up finding a video executing the same idea later on, so sorry for stealing your thunder, Lyt.
Basically - I wasn't just curious what happens when you play every Balatro Joker at once. I was curious if I could tap into current trends and intentionally make a semi-viral video.
Making the mod and video was pretty trivial - I ended up implementing the 'every joker' run as a challenge since that's the easiest way to start with a preset list of jokers. I just pointed OBS at my screen, played a hand, and let the game do it's thing. I ended up with a pretty lucky play - the score went crazy, but a lot of other little things happened. Gros Michel got destroyed, two copies of Death were made for some reason, and my version of the modding API just crashed after the hand was done. It was a perfect storm.
I made a little thumbnail using the sprite sheet from the game, threw it onto YouTube, and waited. At first, a few views trickled in, but it didn't seem too crazy. Oh well, I let it sit and went on with my life.
Then, I started getting DMs from friends on Discord. The algorithm picked it up - people were surprised to see a video I made suddenly being recommended to them. And then, the views started exploding. That thing shot up fast. According to YouTube's analytics, in about a month I wasted ten thousand hours of people's collective time.
I certainly don't wanna give the impression that I think one high-performing YouTube video is that unusual or worthy of praise or anything. But I'm surprised how... easy, it was.
There's still that other video I found demonstrating the same concept, but that guy was on Ante 18. I think mine had the benefit of being a little snappier, having a slightly more attention-grabbing thumbnail, stuff like that. Presentation matters - though I still didn't put that much effort into it.
I also found it surprising just how hollow it felt in the end. There's hundreds of comments, but they tend to repeat one of a few points about the two Death cards or a joke about how high the score was, and kinda just turned into noise after a bit. By the numbers, this is my most successful YouTube video by a wide margin, but by that same measure it's easily the least satisfying. The recognition doesn't feel earned. Though, I guess that's how it tends to go - Even Markiplier's most popular video probably falls in a similar camp.
It's a common problem for artists, where fanart and 'content' that cashes in on trends tends to do better than the original stuff they actually want to make. My little gamedev videos certainly don't do as well as this one - hell, even another video I have showing off a Balatro mod I made has less engagement than this one. Balatro itself is one of the rare exceptions to the rule. LocalThunk made it for himself first, and happened to hit the right notes to have massive commercial success, without piggybacking off an existing IP or trend (unless you wanna count rougelites as a genre). And now as a result, there's a bunch of games coming out trying to copy Balatro's formula in hopes of receiving a crumb of the same success it did. The cycle continues.
Anyways, that's enough of me bragging about a YouTube video. Hope you thought this was at least a bit interesting.
If you wanna try the mod yourself, I have it on GitHub.