With many multi-denomination games, as you increase your denomination, you often see the line counts go down. What’s the purpose of that, a player wonders:
On machines like dragon cash, lightning link, why on 1 and 2 cent denominations are there 50 – 100 lines but on higher denominations like 5, 10 cent and even dollars the lines are smaller?
Mary
The main cause of this is to make the higher denominations a bit more accessible than if they all had the same line counts.
Let’s take the nickel denomination as an example. On these sorts of games, you’ll usually find a 25 line game at that level instead of the 50 they normally start with. That means instead of a $2.50 minimum bet for nickels, it’s able to be available at $1.25.
That may encourage more players to step up their bet a bit for a higher denomination, and get more comfortable with those higher denomination options, which is one of the things that these newer machines do – they let players experiment at lower bets, and then work their way up into bigger bets if they like the game or like how they play at those levels.
Players are much more likely to be comfortable jumping around bets and denominations than they used to be, and the multi-denomination structure is a huge part of this. A part of that strategy is to soften the step-ups with a reduction in lines. You can do a $1 denomination bet for $5 instead of $50 because the line count was reduced to 5.
Of course, for players who want those additional lines, they’ve solved that question with the high limit versions of these games, which also come with the option for more lines and much bigger bets. But for the main casino floor, where many people aren’t betting massively, a $5 bet is still accessible, and hence the structure of the game reflects the journey many players are willing to take.
The end result of these adjustments is a higher average bet on these sorts of slot machines – and higher average bets, combined with heavy use of the machines, means they’re very healthy for a casino’s bottom line.
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