I recently happened into Balatro through a Game Pass trial. I fell deep down the rabbit hole of trying to get it to run on SteamOS.

It's fascinating to see a commercial game whose source is easily read inside the application bundle, and all the modding opportunities it opens up. (It's written in Lua with LÖVE.) Balatro was one of the biggest games of last year, and I'm sure the tinkerability was a big catalyst to that - people porting it to obscure platforms and making mods to extend the game.

It's also really cool to see how the game handles all the different ecosystems it exists in (Steam, Game Pass, Apple, Android, Nintendo Switch…).

I've got a Nix derivation that ought to be able to run any version of the game in Linux. Now I just need to figure out why it crashes when opened in game mode.

All this is way more effort than just spending the $10 to get it to run in Steam natively, but it's more interesting this way.

> Balatro was one of the biggest games of last year, and I'm sure the tinkerability was a big catalyst to that

Not sure I agree on that point. Balatro is a great game and the mainstream success is warranted, but my gut tells me that the technical implementation was not the catalyst for that. Sure, Lua’s portability could have led to the cross-platform popularity, but a mainstream gamer does not tinker with and mod Balatro at all.

Reminds me of WhatsApp that was on all devices early on to maximize their network effect.

I managed to run Balatro on a Trimui Brick on a very minimalist Linux distro, steamos should be easy.

With a little effort you can get mods working on Android. I have the cryptid mod installed on my phone.

> get it to run on SteamOS

Huh? I had to do zero extra work to run it on the steam deck.