Since the online casino industry was established in the mid-1990s, there’s been a lot of developments that perhaps don’t get the credit they deserve from wider media. For example, there was the optimization for mobile policy in the 2000s, which ensured that all games bridged across multiple devices – the sector was way ahead of others in this. And there was the roll-out of live casino in the mid-2010s, using cutting-edge console technology that delivers a truly immersive experience.
But perhaps the online casino sector’s greatest – or smartest – achievement was to use economies of scale principles to create vast progressive jackpot networks. If you think about it, every type of casino game has a jackpot. It’s just another word for top prize. But a progressive jackpot is something else. The “progressive” part means ever-growing, and these prizes can grow very large indeed.
If you have walked through the floor of a Las Vegas casino, you’ll have probably seen the jackpot tickers displayed above the gaming machines. But progressive jackpot games at online casinos are much more extensive in scope and, arguably, ingenuity. But how do they work in terms of software? And how are the prizes determined?
RNG creates random prize determination
The first thing to say is that these prizes are truly random. Nobody knows, including the casinos, when the prizes will be awarded. Moreover, it’s not the casino that manages the jackpot side of the game – it’s the software developer, i.e., the game’s creator. Regardless, each game uses RNG software to determine a specific number for the jackpot to reach before it is awarded.
So, let’s say hypothetically, the RNG software has determined the upper limit for the jackpot is $12,764,833.22. That’s a big jackpot, but not uncommon in the modern casino industry. The online casino will provide a base amount (called a seed); let’s say it’s $100,000 in this case. Now, with each spin, the jackpot will begin to grow.
The growth is determined by players’ wagers, with each spin taking a small percentage from the bet to add the jackpot. The key element here is ‘small’. The jackpot will represent only one facet of the game, so the contribution needs to be small enough that it goes unnoticed. Normally, it’s somewhere around 1%. Thus, if the average bet is $1, each spin will contribute one cent to the jackpot.
Economies of scale helps share the load
As you might imagine, then, it would take a lot of pennies (spins) to grow the jackpot to over $12 million – over 1.2 billion, in fact. Even a very popular game will struggle to have so many spins at an individual casino, but this is where it comes back to what we said about economies of scale. The game will be linked through a progressive network, meaning players at different casinos will be playing for – and contributing to – the same jackpot. Factor this in, and these top prizes can grow very fast.
What, then, determines the winner? Well, as the top prize is set at a predetermined figure, it is the player who breaks the threshold that is awarded the jackpot. So, if the jackpot was currently $12,764,833.21, and it was your $1 spin that brought it to $12,764,833.22, it would be you who won the grand prize.
You have probably figured out that we are dealing with low probabilities here. The chances of winning one of these huge jackpots are in a similar territory to winning the lottery. But as we mentioned earlier, there is more to these games than jackpots, and some of the standard prizes can be very large. But the above gives you an insight into how these games work and how the winner is determined.
–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —
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