We all have our lucky machines, go-to games that seem to never let us down. Do casinos catch on to this?
Some of my favorite slots are gone. These games were fun, paid off frequently, and kept me going. Do casinos simply get rid of machines known to be generous or because of their age?
Jacqueline H.
We’re sorry to hear your favorite slots are disappearing! In recent years there’s been a trend of slots getting replaced faster than they used to – the days of machines sitting there and getting used less often are starting to fade away.
There’s a variety of reasons for this – the new machines are getting played more, many old machines are no longer supported by manufacturers, making maintaining them more expensive. In recent years, the fact that many casinos are replacing longer rows of slots with less machines in a circular pod format simply means casinos are keeping less slots on the floor, and focusing on ones that perform better overall.
This means many of our old games (favorites to many, especially those who have been gambling for a long time) are slowly disappearing off casino floors, especially if they were part of those sections that were less frequently getting play.
One thing casinos aren’t doing is removing machines that are “too generous,” however, because casinos themselves set the payback percentages of the games they install, and over the long term they will get more or less the expected percentage back off of them. If a machine is generous at some point, it will eventually balance out with less generous periods, and converge on that payback that’s expected over time.
So the old slots, whether the machines are too hard to maintain or just not getting enough play, and usually a combination of both, is the main reason why older slots are disappearing.
If games are still popular beyond the life of a machine, the manufacturer will often release the game on a new machine (Cleopatra is a classic example of this, and Ultimate Fire Link is a more recent example), and casinos will simply get newer machines and put the same game on it. But most of the time, the slot has run its course and the casino opts to bring in something new.
Have a question? Submit yours here!
It’s weird how it usually seems to be a game that I had just hit big on a couple weeks prior, or had been having a lot of luck on in general. And they usually get replaced with Dragon Link or some version of “Huff N’ Puff”.
It makes sense that Dragon Link and Huff N’ Puff would replace it, given they’re among the highest performing games on casino floors today. If certain slots aren’t performing to the same level, they’ll replace them. A slot order can be weeks or months in the making, so it’s likely your machine was targeted well before you got on a winning streak, not because of your wins, but because it’s underperforming relative to expected performance of the game that will replace it.