kinduff parent
While I understand the sentiment of Playstack and LocalThunk to take down these kind of ports, it's a shame for the community because this will only make the game grow more.
It doesn’t sound like they did? The author seems to be proactively not releasing out of respect for LocalThunk, not out of fear. (And certainly not because they’ve already been sent a takedown or anything.)
Because he didn't published it, but there are other similar ports that have been taken down.
For example, this C64 port was taken down: https://ko-ko74.itch.io/balatro-for-the-commodore-64-c64
What legal standing would they even have, if the game were simply named something different from "Balatro"? Game mechanics aren't copyrightable, and the game assets are literally just playing cards...