Balatro has been played for a grand total of 11,000 years, apparently, but is that plausible?

• Balatro has been played, cumulatively, for 11,000 years
• At least that's what developer LocalThunk says
• Is it a joke, or actually plausible?

Indie hit card-battler Balatro has been played for over 11,000 years, cumulatively. At least that's according to the game's developer, who goes by LocalThunk on Twitter. And while it may be tempting to write off this banana emoji-accompanied Tweet as a joke, it's a bit more likely than you might think.

Balatro is a take on the solitaire format, where players form poker hands to beat given scores, or blinds. The twist is that you also get the deck-building aspects of less standard card games by adding in Jokers that multiply certain hands or provide other effects, and unique poker cards that can also increase your score or multiplier.

But enough tiptoeing around the topic. How plausible actually is LocalThunk's semi-jokey statement? Well, I'm no mathematician, but let's do a little bit of napkin calculation.

Well, a year has 8760 hours, 11,000 times that equals 96,360,000 hours. Sounds beefy, right? Well, let's look at the number of downloads Balatro has. The most easily verified is somewhere in the region of 2,000,000, so let's take that as our base.

So, if we divide 96,360,000 by two million we get... 48.18 hours. Now, for some of you may sound excessive, but for the (ahem) more experienced gamers amongst us, we know that's nothing. It basically means every person who downloaded Balatro would have to play for at least two days straight in total. And with some people reporting playtimes of 192 hours, and the possibility mobile isn't even included in the latest numbers, it becomes pretty certain.

Beat that blind

So while you're here, why not check out some of our lists of top games? Our ranking of the best mobile titles of 2024 (so far) is something you can rely on. After all, what other mobile outlet does actual math for you?

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