Google Tries To Ban Game That Inspired Balatro Over Nonexistent Gambling Gameplay

Before Balatro there was Luck Be a Landlord, a roguelike deckbuilder about manipulating a slot machine to try to pay rent amid an ever spiraling out of control cost-of-living crisis. Despite the gambling aesthetic, there’s no part of the game that actually includes gambling with money, real or virtual. But that hasn’t stopped Google from trying to retroactively pull it from its mobile app store over age rating concerns.

“Happy New Year everyone! Just three hours into 2025, I received an email from Google Play Support with the following subject line: Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies (Luck be a Landlord),” announced developer TrampolineTales on January 1. “Nothing has changed with Luck be a Landlord in the past few months, but for whatever reason, my game ‘contains gambling’ now!”

The creator wrote that this has been an issue before in various other countries, and they’ve been left with no choice at this point but to endorse Google’s faulty logic in order to keep Luck Be a Landlord for sale on Android devices. “I genuinely think Luck be a Landlord deserves the equivalent of an E10+ rating across all regions, but at this point I’ve just given up and will deal with whatever inaccurate rating is slapped on the game,” wrote TrampolineTales.

They continued, “I’ve now filled out the Google Play age rating questionnaire to ‘agree’ that my game ‘contains gambling.’ I’m doing this in an attempt to stop my game from being banned globally on Google Play since every time I’ve tried to appeal these decisions I’ve simply been sent a screenshot of my game and was told ‘this is gambling.’”

Balatro, which is heavily inspired by Luck Be a Landlord and replaces the slot machine mechanics with poker-based gameplay, faced similar issues last year. The association with gambling first got it briefly banned from the Nintendo Switch eShop and later led to an erroneous 18+ age rating from PEGI in Europe. It’s unclear how much of this reoccurring issue is because people in charge of ratings don’t know how games work, or are so overworked that they don’t actually have time to pay attention to what they’re rating.

The faulty association with gambling is particularly pernicious considering there are plenty of games on mobile shops that do feature very obvious gambling mechanics, including ones you can spend real money on. EA Sports FC Mobile replicates the card-pack-opening probabilities of its console counterpart, and even Pokémon TCG Pocket lets players spend money to speed up booster pack openings that all rely on chance for whether you get new rare cards or duplicates of the ones you already own. These, as well as many RPGs with gacha-fueled character-collecting mechanics, are all rated E for Everyone.