I’m Slow

Hello people, long time no chat!

I have some unfortunate news: The promised 2025 Balatro 1.1 update isn’t going to come out in 2025. I know, I announced that it would, but it has become clear now that it won’t happen by the end of the year and I wanted to tell you all now. I feel bad for not keeping that promise, and I am sorry.

The truth is that I probably shouldn’t have announced any date for the 1.1 update at all. I’m a hobbyist developer at heart and I love to tinker. If you read my blog post about the Balatro timeline, you’ll know that since the game went public in the summer of 2023 I have become all too familiar with the crunch and stress that inherently come with professional game development. The struggles of pre-launch are detailed in that blog post, but unfortunately it didn’t stop at launch. Immediately after Balatro 1.0 came out in February 2024 I dove right in to a big balance patch (1.0.1), then into the mobile port of the game right after, and by the time the mobile version came out in late 2024 I was well and truly burned out.

I took a break from everything to do with the game for a few months until the start of 2025 when I very slowly eased myself back into the work. However, I chose to only work on the game like I did when the project began, as a hobbyist (a few hours per day, and not always on the 1.1 update), and it turns out that it’s a lot slower than working in crunch mode 12 hours per day like I was around launch.

I still love drawing my silly jokers, I carry around a notebook that is now teeming with ideas to implement or test in the game, and thankfully I still consider this my hobby, but the prospect of rushing the work and going back into crunch mode to get it out this year just felt terrible.

I am working slowly, but I like it that way. I love getting sucked into rabbit holes and I don’t like trying to force things creatively. I have never, before Balatro, set a deadline for any of my creative projects and I now realize how important that is for my process. I am in a very lucky position in that I can choose to work this job however I wish, and I think the best version of “work” for me is the version that makes me want to come back to my keyboard every day, healthy, and hopefully just as excited about game development 5 years from now as I am today. I don’t want 1.1 to be the last update this game gets.

So I’m apologizing here, now, to you. I won’t be making the 2025 deadline I said I would. Balatro 1.1 will still come out, of that I am certain, but the new timeline is going to be it’s done when it’s done. It will be a free update for everyone on all platforms when it’s ready, and it’ll probably need some adjustments when it’s out there in the world (like 1.0 did), but that won’t be this year.

I posted a few months ago that I finally got 100% of the achievements in Balatro, and for a bit of reassurance, the Balatro player in me will absolutely not allow me walk away from developing this game. I’m already super excited to try and 100% the game all over again from a second profile when 1.1 is ready. Rest assured, it will happen.