Online slot games have had a steep rise in popularity and playability in the last 10 years, with many new features, game types, and choices for players to manage their experience. Slots, as a whole, have been the most popular format of gambling for many years, with the number of rounds played surpassing live table games and conventional sports betting.
With an estimated 15,000 different slot games to choose from, it’s not hard to imagine the difficulty for a newer casino player to identify what games would be more fun and engaging to play than others. There are countless differences between slot games currently, and what’s for sure is that bog-standard 10 pay line or fewer games are a thing of the past and quite often don’t match up with new titles and features with better graphics, storylines and potential outcomes.
While slots currently hold the top spot in terms of popularity, there are, in fact, many features and alternate outcomes in games such as online roulette, poker, and blackjack, with far more side bets and feature games available that aren’t all that different from online slots. Games such as lightning roulette and 3-card poker have been inspired by slot games, giving the possibility of achieving bonus rounds, just like in slots.
It’s all about the engagement
Online slot games have always been looked upon as the least skill-oriented game type for players, and while this is true, random number generators give a completely consistent chance of winning the biggest rounds and achieving the highest multipliers in games. Many table games do require an element of skill or knowledge of the game but always come with a risk that small errors can be costly.
With that being said, identifying a high-quality game can be considered a skill in itself. Identifying the features and rules of a game can quite often tell you all you need to know to make the decision to play or not. First, knowing how many different feature games are available in the game is vital, such as having random activations of bonuses or being able to choose from multiple bonus rounds that vary in volatility.
Many would jump to the mode which offers the highest volatility rating that’s often shown, which would allow for the highest multipliers, wild features, and most valuable symbols. While this may give the biggest chance of hitting the most emphatic wins, you’re likely to receive fewer wins per round and can often leave the player with no win whatsoever. In the game rules of each of these games, the Return to Player (RTP) ratio will be displayed for each mode/setting available in the game, and you’ll often see the most volatile often has the lowest RTP rating.
Bonus-buys – a good or bad choice?
This works in the same way as the bonus-buy function, which is the most popular format for gaming streamers due to how entertaining watching feature rounds after feature rounds are. The RTP does differ between the normal game and just the bonus buy feature and will often be a lot less. Be sure to check the game rules and analyze the difference between the two.
It’s often forgotten that the base game can sometimes offer huge wins in themselves, often overshadowing the bonus game and the notion that only this can be entertaining. Typically, you should be reaching a bonus round in every 100 spins once, and this is the reason for the bonus costing around 100 times your stake. Along the way, you’re likely to pick up some base game hits, which can be somewhat relative to the return to player percentage.
What you’d often pay a hundred times your stake for could often be achieved for a fraction of this, or even reaching a profit when the goal of unlocking the bonus has been reached. Especially when considering that some more modern-styled games do offer multiple levels of feature bonuses, whereby the most volatile costs far more which can range up to 500x. With all things considered, buying the highest feature level would often result in a loss.
In the base game, to reach the highest bonus level would usually comprise of the number of bonus symbols you hit; for example, on a 5-reel slot, with three different bonuses to achieve, you would need at least 3 to reach the standard bonus and hitting 4 or 5 would offer the other features. Some games would show this by having a different bonus symbol, often labeled as a super bonus. With this in mind, checking the game information and rules may be boring, but often necessary to understand what you’re looking to achieve.