Today’s question is a simple one, albeit an area we’ve delved in the past:
Are the payback percentages getting lower or what?
Miguel
No, that’s not what’s happening, although there are shifts happening in the gaming industry. Let’s take a look at what is, and isn’t, changing nowadays.
Payback Options Are Similar on New Slots
Game makers are, generally speaking, offering a similar range of payback options on games that they offered a few years ago. Slots nowadays are mostly offered with choices between 85 and 98 percent, with higher paybacks most often being assigned to higher denomination slots.
Casinos then have the ability to choose what payback they want each machine on their floor to have, from among the options that slot makers offer them. On multi-denomination machines they can set the payback for each denomination. So… what about the casinos?
Casino Paybacks Haven’t Really Changed Either
As we shared in our piece about paybacks before and after the pandemic, not much there has changed in recent years either. Generally speaking, the reporting also still shows that higher denomination games, generally speaking, offer better payback over time than the lower denomination counterparts.
Some thought is being given to overall bet size, vs. an arbitrary denomination setting, in that machines that encourage or require higher overall bets offer better payback than those with lower overall bets. This makes sense when you can do $20 or $30 a spin on penny denomination nowadays on certain machines.
But the general payback philosophy is the same – higher bets will tend to be rewarded with a better payback percentage, or at least what casinos thing will yield a higher bet.
Bet Ranges Are Getting Higher
One thing that has changed, and isn’t a new development but has evolved over time, is that minimum and maximum bets have been growing. 20 and 30 line games 15 years ago evolved to 50 cent minimum bets on games like Lightning Link 10 years ago, to sometimes even $1 a spin floors on some machines today.
For the player, the impact is simple – more money is being wagered per hour on a slot. That money is exposed to a house edge built into the machines – that’s how the payback percentage is achieved over time. That means you’re going to lose money faster, on average, than you would have before, because the ins and outs are higher.
The same sort of impact occurs when casinos raise table game minimums. Assuming nothing else changes, your loss per hour doubles when a $5 table becomes a $10 table and you’re forced to bet double every hand.
Volatility is Getting Higher
This is the area that many players are feeling. Bonuses and big wins are harder to get, but when you do get them, they pay better. That’s effectively what higher volatility means, and slots continue to go in that direction.
Many slots have less money in the line hits, you have to get multiple bonus upgrades from the three pots, and so on to reach the bigger payout potential.
Huff N’ Even More Puff raised the minimum bet by a third and introduced a second wheel, pushing the bets up and making the biggest wins harder to reach than ever in the game series. But people still love it because of the massive potential.
And that’s the thing – some are frustrated that slots are harder to win on, but if you look at the data being reported by third-party monitoring companies, it’s those same harder games that players are playing the most.
Takeaway
Bets are higher, slots are harder, and that means less people are taking home the wins. We had conversations with some in the know who say that something like 15-20% of slot sessions are winners, and that the average bonus now occurs every 120 spins or so, a number that continues to grow.
It wasn’t always this way, but casinos don’t have to change a thing, as players are betting more than ever, and their percentage grows with that – casinos are a volume business, and they don’t have to change a thing about payouts if people are willing to put more money on the line. That’s been the case in recent years, and for now that means no real changes are required.
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