Balatro wins hearts as the People's Choice at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2025

• The Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2025 took place at Gamescom in Germany.
• Balatro won the People's Choice award, ahead of honourable mentions Monument Valley 3, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

LocalThunk’s Balatro has won the People's Choice award at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2025.

PocketGamer.biz awarded the standout stars of the industry with fresh accolades at Gamescom this week, celebrating mobile game makers everywhere.

Tailor-made to reward all the creators, makers, movers and shakers that make mobile games happen, we spent the night cheering on finalists and unveiling winners across 24 categories.

We have already explored the successes of Best Developer winner Supercell and Best Publisher winner Scopely, as well as our Game of the Year winner Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.

Now it’s time to take a look at the best game of the past 12 months as voted for by consumers, Balatro.

One more round…

Originally taking the world by storm on PC, indie card game Balatro combines the rules of poker with a roguelike structure and elements of solitaire, allowing players to bend the rules, defeat bosses and hit high scores.

After reaching one million sales on Steam, solo developer LocalThunk teamed up with Playstack to publish on mobile, expanding the card game sensation to iOS and Android in September 2024.

The title swam against the free-to-play tide as a pay-upfront premium release, and despite ignoring the monetisation trend, picked up almost $1m in its first week on the platform.

As players spent hard cash for a chance to play Balatro on the go, the game quickly topped Google Play’s paid card game category and the App Store's strategy segment. Naturally, those early earnings were directly tied to downloads, with further installs from Apple Arcade too.

LocalThink first envisioned Balatro as a game "for myself and a few friends", but after selling five million units across platforms within a year of its PC debut, it’s ended up changing the conversation around monetisation models and even challenged the PEGI rating system.

According to AppMagic estimates, the game is verging on $30m in player spending on mobile alone.

Honourable mentions

Of course, there are so many mobile developers deserving of their own spotlight from this past year, so we’ve also compiled a list of finalists worth celebrating.

Honourable mentions go to Monument Valley 3, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Other finalists include:

• Battle Cars
• Bloons Card Storm
• Etheria: Restart
• Fortnite Battle Royale
• Gordian Quest
• I Am Your Beast
• Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
• Marvel Mystic Mayhem
• Scattered Verse
• Crunchyroll: Shogun Showdown
• Songs of Conquest
• Squid Game: Unleashed
• Sunset Hills
• Crunchyroll: The Star Named EOS
• Thronefall
• What the Clash?