Periodically we see the topic of server based slots come up. Here’s a recent example from our inbox:
I have read several articles about server-based slots. They are controlled by a main computer and can be changed by the click of a mouse. Most if not all of the newer games are server-based slots. The payout percentage and hit frequency can be changed depending on the State Gaming Control rules of inactivity. What are your thoughts on this type of slot machine?
Denise L.
The idea of server based slots isn’t new, and neither is the fears of casinos making payback changes or manipulating a machine in real time while players are playing them. Many point to a more than 15-year-old article in the New York Times about the technology.
Before we explore the tech itself and answer your question, hit frequency was never something server-based slots could change – that’s up to the overall design of the game, and not a setting casinos have. More common settings would be things like what game is on a specific machine, the payback percentage, the denominations available, etc.
The good news – although you say most newer games are server-based slots, that actually isn’t true. We’ve spoken with industry professionals about the topic enough to see a concurrent theme: They never really took off.
Kevin Sweet, who at one time was overseeing the floor at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, posted publicly in forums awhile back about how the promise of the technology never met the reality. For instance, one way it could be used was to change denominations on slots. So you could, say, remove the penny denomination during the weekends to try to encourage higher bets. But, he noted, the casino was never so busy for this to be all that helpful or necessary.
Also, these solutions tended to be glitchy, and in practice never really worked as they were promoted to be. As such, most casinos never went this direction.
As to the idea that casinos could make changes with a click, take Nevada, which was always at the forefront of regulations on this. They allowed this sort of technology, but with a sufficient number of caveats, particularly:
- The machines needed to be completely devoid of credits – any money in the machine at all and it could not take place.
- A machine needed to be idle for a few minutes before any changes could be made.
Taking these two rules alone, players’ sessions could not be messed with midstream, and if someone left a few cents behind for however long after that until the machine was played and cashed out, or someone found the credits and took them.
Casinos don’t need to tinker with payouts when you’re playing anyway, given the 5-15% house edge slots have, but that’s another story.
Many players point to this technology as how casinos change payouts based on time of day or day of the week. But there’s always some people in the casino. Imagine the casino wanted to globally update the payback of all the slots on the floor. Imagine all the machines around you that have been idle all restarting because of a change in settings (which is how slots update to reflect the new settings and run security checks).
Where’s the TikTok footage of all the slots updating around a player in real time? There’s be obvious things happening to meet the requirements that have to happen for these changes to take place, and you just don’t see it.
So our take: It’s a nothing burger. Most casinos don’t have it, those that do never found it all that workable, and ultimately most casinos still update slots the way they’ve always been updated: With software chips, opening up the machine to change settings, documenting them with a witness, etc. They don’t need to make changes becuase they tend to do just fine as they’re set up, and if they do, they’re going to manage those individually. Floor-wide changes just don’t tend to happen.
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