6 ms·

How casinos get you to spend more money

99 points by bennesvig 12y ago

FreeKill 12y ago
From a software/hardware engineering perspective, how difficult is it to get into the slot machine game? I imagine it must have quite a rigorous set of guidelines and testing procedures that must be followed diligently to avoid running afoul of regulations set out by gambling states. Also, I assume it must require a lot of trade show visits to try and sell major casinos on your machine, since the number of customers for your machines is severely limited. Is it an upfront cost business (aka, they pay you $XXX for each machine) or is it more of a partnership with the makers where the casinos share profits on the machines with the developer/designers? Off the top of my head, I'd think the latter would be more feasible as I'm sure popularity of machines must be somewhat short lived, as there always seems to be different machines all the time. Anyway, I'm curious if anyone with more experience in this area could give some brief highlights on what it's like working in that arena. I've always been curious :)
- joezydeco 12y ago
  I worked in the business for a number of years and still have friends/colleagues that are there. From an engineering perspective slot machine design isn't very hard at all. It's pretty much video game design. There's a relatively recent CPU putting down images, playing back video, doing some light/sound choreography, and maybe doing some mechanical motion on some games. Let's put it as slightly more complex than Candy Crush but way less complex than writing Halo. There's also a mechanical component with artists and designers making cabinets, art glass, and wacky add-ons that sit on top or around the machine. The hard work in slot machine design is in the math of the slot machine. You're trying to design a game that balances something interesting on-screen with enough volatility that keeps players hooked. If you decimate their bank in the first 100 spins that player will never come back. One typical way to manipulate this is through the secondary games or bonus games that pop up on certain reel combinations. At first this was a way to work around certain patents (the most famous being IGT's Telnaes patent) and now players just come to expect various levels of extra action when certain slot reels are hit. Every player likes something different, of course. IGT's Double Diamonds reel-spinning slot is over 25 years old and players still look for it. The math also has to jive with the gaming board. Certain states will mandate minimum payout percentages, or a mixture of these that average a certain payout. (This is why dollar slots in Vegas pay way better than penny slots. As long as all the action in the casino averages to the legal minimum, they're okay). Your typical slot manufacturer has a number of math/stat MS or PhDs working out the numbers on paper as well as a testing department that tries to verify the math empirically. I'll say "tries" because some designs are so complex and non-deterministic or dependent on player choice that it can't be verified entirely on paper anymore. Almost all American jurisdictions employ independent gaming labs that inspect the code and verify the math as well before the slot is approved to release in a given state. If you can get approved in Nevada, you're usually good everywhere as a rule of thumb. And then yes, the theme of the slot has also become incredibly important. Licensing pop culture items (movies, TV shows, dead musicians, celebrities, etc etc etc) is a constant fight between the manufacturers to capture and leverage into a usable slot idea. Some think it is creatively lazy to grab the next hot movie and turn it into a slot. Some think that's what you need to do to attract people's attention in a visually crammed environment. C'est la vie. A slot machine designer worth his salt can mix and meld all of these things into an interesting game. New and different game mechanics are hard to come by, though. When something does hit, you'll see that model replicated dozens of times with slightly different math or new themes slapped on top of it. You throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. Business wise, up until a few decades ago, slots were sold by manufacturers and entirely owned by the casinos. In the last 20 years or so this has transitioned into a participation relationship where the manufacturers own, maintain, and operate the games themselves and share a percentage of the handle with the casino. This has made the business a lot more cutthroat because a streak of lousy games can get you kicked off a property (or corporation) entirely. This is the downside of throwing shit at the wall, so you test and test continuously at smaller properties. Participation also allows interesting game mechanics like multi-casino slots (like Megabucks) where the manufacturer is holding the jackpot in an interest-bearing account in their reserves. Think about that when the jackpot is in 9 figures and nobody has hit it for a year. Anyway, if you're really interested, the big companies are always hiring. These days it's IGT in Reno, NV and WMS in Chicago, IL. There are smaller companies here and there (Konami, Aristocrat, Mikohn) and then a constellation of independent design groups that consult and design games on spec for the big dogs. Most designers work their way up from programming games or designing art for slots but if you have any video game or casual game experience there's always room for new talent.
  - jedberg 12y ago
    > IGT's Double Diamonds reel-spinning slot is over 25 years old and players still look for it. It's the only slot I'll play because it has the best pay table in the casino. It's the only one that pays 1600 coins for a 2 coin bet with sufficient payouts otherwise.
    - toong 12y ago
      Euhm, I don't know anything about slot machines, but isn't the (statistical) expected value not always about the same ? The payout-distribution could be different, maybe that's what you like about it ? (anecdotal: I calculated the expected value for a few games on a gambling site a few years ago and they were all about the same, for every game, for every size of bet: expected value was around .96 dollar for every 1$ bet. YMMV.)
      - lewispollard 12y ago
        That expected value is known in the industry as RTP - return to player - and is generally in the 85-98% range. Once a game is certified as having that RTP, it can't change - BUT the standard deviation can vary wildly from machine to machine, with some paying out little and often, and others having a more 'lumpy' distribution of not paying out much and then paying out large prizes every so often. High rollers will often go for these lumpier machines, staking large amounts and hoping for the elusive x1000 multipliers.
        joezydeco 12y ago
        Very good point. But players should also know that a given machine can be released in multiple payout levels. You can have a row of identical games but the game in the middle could be set at 95% and the others around it set to 87%. And the casino doesn't have to identify which is which. Sometimes you can glean this from the payout tables, you can almost always glean it from video poker games. There's a voodoo science around how casinos are laid out and how games are arranged to maximize cashflow. You can get a degree in this at UNLV.
- downandout 12y ago
  The big issue isn't engineering, it's licensing. In the words of the attorney that helped me with a Nevada gaming license application, "They really want to make sure you're clean before they give you a license to steal". For example, if you went to high school in Hawaii, they will send two gaming agents to Hawaii - on your dime - to interview your high school teachers. The process is long and expensive. And that's just Nevada. You have to be licensed in each individual jurisdiction where your games will be shipped. This, of course, is all before you even broach the subject of putting your game on casino floors with slot/table game managers. As far as revenue models, both of those you mentioned are used. This also goes back to licensing - if you are only licensed as a manufacturer (a slightly less onerous process) then you cannot get a percentage of profits. You must have an operating license to obtain a percentage. This is why many table game manufacturers (3 Card Poker etc) get a flat fee per table per day instead of a percentage. The machine market is dominated by IGT and WMS, and good luck penetrating it. You may, however, be able to develop a fun game and license it to one of the big slot firms. Probably the easiest way.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    If you hang out at the back of the Global Gaming Expo (aka G2E), there are dozens of inventors in little booths trying to show off their new game and get you to try it. If you don't have a connection to a big company, this is one way to get discovered, but by judging what I've seen in some of those booths, you really have to have a compelling, easy, addicting game to get noticed. And most of those little guys have none of the above.
    - downandout 12y ago
      Anyone can demo any game they have developed, but before those games go into a casino, they must go through everything I said above. Many of those guys go to G2E to either get noticed by a larger manufacturer, or to find investors to help them go through the licensing process (or convince existing investors to do the same after a good response at the show).
leeoniya 12y ago
pardon the hijacking, but what's with this trend of everything above the fold looking like an entire complete page with almost no content? half the time i land on sites like this, i sit there for 5 seconds wondering where the hell the content is. the scrollbar is not that visible, guys. if i dont see partial content hiding at the bottom of the fold which would clue me into the fact that there's 10 more pages worth of scrolling, i'm not gonna "get it" by noticing a scroll bar. the pretty UI is not worth the horrid UX EDIT: i think repliers are focusing too much on scrollbar visibility. this isnt the main issue. i have no problem with the scrollbar being visible on other sites. it's plenty visible on my Win 8.1 / Firefox 1080p res. The problem is that A) i dont want to scroll an entire page before i begin reading and B) i dont want it to be the primary (and sole) indicator of additional content. I have to look over to the side to get the only cue, it's really annoying. /rant.
- dm2 12y ago
  I've noticed that too and also do not like it. I'd prefer the traditional style article and thumbnails where necessary (not just for the sake of cramming images into articles). Maybe they've done testing and this style article gets read/shared more, it certainly looks more official and permanent but it's still just a blog post / news article. This is where I first saw it, and it's annoying to read the huge text and adjust to the images that float under text: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-time-an-air-force-f-16-and-an-army-missile-battery-fought-each-other-bb89d7d03b7d https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-time-an-air-force-f-16... Apparently they never even considered what it would look like when someone tries to print that article, the 1st half of the page is a solid black image, then the text is laughably large.
  - NotAtWork 12y ago
    That page you linked is horrendous!
    - dm2 12y ago
      This link from the same site is on the front page of HN today: https://medium.com/@sachagreif/in-the-past-couple-years-startups-have-started-realizing-that-good-design-can-make-the-difference-2fdeb90d390a https://medium.com/@sachagreif/in-the-past-couple-years-star... It's a decent article and fairly interesting (though not surprising), but the layout is like navigating a minefield, it's still better than the multi-page layouts that are common on some sites. Try to print this article though, 17 pages. 17 pages. Their main business is offering content in a format that is readable and accessible to users. One solution would be to have an alternate layout with normal sized text, no giant header image, and thumbnails rather than half-page images, and that layout preference would be both saved in a cookie and settable via a URL parameter.
GuiA 12y ago
I come from a country where casinos are much rarer than they are in the US, and I recently went in my first casino ever after living in the US for 4+ years. So I entered this weird place in Montana, with colorful machines everywhere. A more experienced friend instructed me to play a certain machine, in which I put $5 and got 100 virtual "tokens" in exchange. Then the machine asked me to pick 7 random numbers from a 10x10 grid. I touched the 7 numbers, and pressed a flashy "Go" button. The machine "randomly" (of course I have no certainty that it was truly a random process) picked 7 numbers, and only 1 of mine matched. Total gains: 0. I repeated the process several dozen times: select your numbers, press a button, watch the machine make funky sounds as it "randomly" selects number, see if yours match. The best round I got was when 3 of mine matched, and I got back something like 10 credits, going from 47 to 57. 10 minutes later, I was at 0. It strikes me as a tragedy of our modern society that such contraptions make for a significant portion of state income, and that they are as popular as they are. It is sad that the average American citizen does not have a sufficient grasp of basic probabilities to even consider putting money in such a machine, because it means that the school system essentially fails at preparing kids for the real world. And it is sad that governments are encouraging those temples for theft to prosper the way they do. Because it really is theft - just a kind of theft where the victim is coaxed into it with the help of smoke, mirrors, and free booze (not unlike the phone scams that prey on the elderly and manage to extract thousands of dollars from them). And not only is it institutionalized theft, it is institutionalized classist theft, as the vast majority of the victims are from the lowest socio-economical classes of society.
- dm2 12y ago
  There only in a few cities in the US where you can gamble like that, it's illegal in most places. Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Indian reservations, cruise ships, and casino boats are the only places I can think of that allow gambling in the US. I'm not sure if there is a loophole for horse racing tracks or how that works. Video gaming machines might be what you what you saw but they're really not much different than an arcade that spits out tickets. I think those video gaming machines are becoming more rare / illegal. Our brains aren't wired to correctly calculate the fact that we're more likely to lose than win. Same with lottery tickets, people get addicted to those things and don't stop until they run out of money. Even people in Haiti would receive a little money (meant to be used for food and other essentials) and spent it on lottery tickets.
unsignedint 12y ago
So some thought about this, as I used to be regular of a local casino, not because I felt I had to go, just to play with cash vouchers, they used to send, maybe occasionally putting in a 10 dollar bill or two. I didn't make money out of it, but I did not lose my own money. I guess when they realized they are not making money from me, they stopped sending me those vouchers... Bummer! :-) Those machines are really designed to salami slice players. You can play many of those machines from a penny per line, which equates to about 15 to 30 cents per play for full lines, depending on a machine. There are people who play at higher stakes, like a max bet of $2 per play, or even $5, but observing people, majority seems to be played at much lower bet of a penny or two per line, so I'm guessing they consists of high fraction of profit a casino is making from. It's fairly easy to lose a sense of spending when you are doing literally a thousand play per hour. (At 30 cents per play, You'd be spending fairly long time to spend $20, or even $10. At this level, a typical win would get you around $2 to $5, maybe $40 if you are quite lucky -- and perhaps real jackpot, being very, very rare, $200 or so.) Those "wins" really give you the joy that you'd anticipate for the next, and a lot of time, they'd put more money in just to anticipate another win, because when they have lost plenty of money, it's about a time they will start winning, right? Knowing someone who really got into it, one sign I started seeing from them is that they'd start making a statement like "I'm not playing it for money, I play it because the game is fun." He would play the game literally for hours per session, often visiting there multiple times a week. Usually ends up losing -- maybe the only good thing is that he'd have accumulated quite a bit of free restaurant credits. So if you are inclined to play, here's some suggestions, though for those people who would feel these suggestions are useful probably find the best is not to play at all: 1) Set a budget -- don't bring extra money. (And don't bring ATM card/credit card if you feel like you can't resist getting extra money out of them...) 2) Record every win/lose -- I've had Google Doc that keeps track of every wins/lose every machine. Every time I cash in, I'd record, every time I cash out, I also record that, that would give me balance sheet how much I'm spending/making. 3) Bet generously -- Don't bet a penny per line, go higher. You won't go anywhere with such low bet anyways. You'll have a better chance getting a better outcome going through that $20 in 2 minutes than spending 2 hours on it. Yeah, it may only last 2 minutes, but then you have good reason (See #1) to leave at that point -- and you are giving less chance for a machine to alter your psychology.
downandout 12y ago
All of this is interesting from an engineering perspective, but the reality is that casinos don't have to use engineering to get you to spend money. They rely on addiction for their income, and there's no evidence that better slot machine technology has swayed addiction rates one way or another (although TITO - ticket-in ticket-out - has made it easier to lose one's money faster). According to one study, 2.8% of the player base accounts for 50% of net casino win; the top 10.7% provides 80% of the win [1]. Without the very small percentage of their visitors that become addicts, every casino on the planet would cease to exist in short order. [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579123383535635644 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...
- DanBC 12y ago
  "Fixed Odds Betting Terminals" are in UK news quite often. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25619683 http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25619683 http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22934305 http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22934305 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27926213 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27926213 Glasgow has a population of about 600,000 people. Gamblers are not travelling to Glasgow - gambling is legal in Scotland so these machines are available in most towns. £200m is $336m
wmt 12y ago
Strange that adding smaller wins to slots has only just arrived, as such more complex betting systems have been proven to make playing feel more rewarding for decades. E.g. in Finland all supermarkets and roadside cafes have slot machines, and complex betting tactics described in the article have been there at least from the 1990s. They do differ a bit from Vegas slots, as the profits go to charity and the jackpots are ~50€, but still they are carefully designed to maximise the profits on the long run.
fiatmoney 12y ago
I would heavily recommend the book they mention ("Addiction By Design"). In addition to the bits about the casinos, there are a lot of fascinating insights into the minds of committed slot machine gamblers.
doomlaser 12y ago
The straight-up gambling industry relies on whales in an eerily similar way to many f2p games. From the linked WSJ article [1]: "The Bwin data also offer a peek at the economics of the casino industry that only insiders normally glimpse. Among the findings is an extreme reliance on revenue from a small number of gamblers. Of the 4,222 casino customers, just 2.8%—or 119 big losers—provided half of the casino's take, and 10.7% provided 80% of the take. Such revenue concentration long has been quietly acknowledged in the casino industry, but the Bwin information may be the first to show it with hard public data." Compare that to the f2p industry. From Re/Code in February [2]: "In a mobile monetization report released today, app testing firm Swrve found that in January, half of free-to-play games’ in-app purchases came from 0.15 percent of players. " "Some game companies talk openly about the fact that they have whales, but others shy away from discussing them publicly. It costs money to develop and keep a game running, just like those fancy decorations and free drinks at a casino; whales, like gambling addicts, subsidize fun for everyone else." [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579123383535635644 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610... [2] http://recode.net/2014/02/26/a-long-tail-of-whales-half-of-mobile-games-money-comes-from-0-15-percent-of-players/ http://recode.net/2014/02/26/a-long-tail-of-whales-half-of-m...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hopfog 12y ago
  I've worked in the industry for one of the biggest online brands and can second this. It was not unusual to see a single customer spend over a million euros. We even had a couple who maxed the account limit of 5 million euros and had to create a second one. These VIPs have their own account managers who often talk to them on a daily basis and they are given lot of gifts which are expensive (trips, luxuries etc) but nowhere near the sums they are spending.
  - rebel 12y ago
    Very interesting information, but I can't tell which industry you mean as the parent was referring to both casinos and f2p games? I assumed f2p but I've never heard of account managers giving gifts in f2p games, that would blow my mind.
oscilloscope 12y ago
An interesting experiment in gambling addiction was the Bitcoin betting site Just-Dice. There were two ways to participate: 1) Choose your bet size and chance to win. The house always had a 1% edge, reflected in the payout. This edge is much lower than slot machines in Vegas. 2) Invest in the house. Every bet affected your bankroll based on your % invested relative to the total bankroll. The house edge was on your side. The operators of the site, Deb and Doog, encouraged anyone trying to make money to invest. They argued the expected value was positive, even though high-rollers sometimes went on winning streaks. Despite the warnings/statistics Doog produced and the fact that there was a +EV way to play (investing), players still got addicted to the dice game itself. The rolls resolved in a fraction of a second, so some players would go on a tear and bet 3-4 times a second. The minimum payout was 1% of the house bankroll, so single bets of several hundred bitcoin were possible. Several high-rollers ("whales") played for 14-16 hours straight in a state of intense "flow", generally winning early on and losing everything by the end. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoin (1000+ btc) lost in a single session. Sometimes coins would come out of cold storage to continue playing. The site had a chatroom where even investors encouraged the player to stop before they were ruined, but the players would generally deny addiction and continue rolling. After losing it all, some players described the experience they were having as a chemical rush- as if they had just taken a drug. Even users who were invested and had made sizable profits from investing were not immune to the lure of the game. Several withdrew their invested bankroll just to "play around" and fell in the same inevitable fashion.
- logicallee 12y ago
  >Even users who were invested and had made sizable profits from investing were not immune to the lure of the game. That is an insane level of product-market fit. Can you imagine if you got to claw back all of the equity you gave up at seed and Series A, because your investors wanted your product even more?
- DanBC 12y ago
  That's a deeply disturbing account of people knowingly exploiting vulnerable people to extract maximum money from them.
kens 12y ago
I read a paper a while ago that explained a bunch of tricky design that goes into slot machines. The odds of a particular symbol on a reel showing up aren't uniform - they use "virtual reels" behind the scenes. The reels are designed to show a lot of "near misses" where you almost win. They have a lot of partial "wins" that pay less than you put in. They "nudge" reels so it looks like you're getting closer to a win, but the odds don't change. They arrange the reels so you see a lot of "good" symbols, but not in places that actually help you. I'm not sure this is the paper I read originally, but it explains all this in detail (ignore the dodgy domain name): http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/PAR-Sheets-Probabilities-and-Slot-Machine-Play-Implications-for-Problem-and-Non-Problem-Gambling.pdf http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/...
- Gusfoo_2 12y ago
  > The reels are designed to show a lot of "near misses" where you almost win. That used to be true but is not any longer after the regulator cracked down. It wasn't the reel design (the strips are fixed) but instead the reel position value.
spacefight 12y ago
"Alternatively, Schüll discovered, some video machines actually make internal adjustments if they notice that a player is on a losing streak and is reaching their "pain point." This has to be done carefully — it's illegal for casinos to change the odds in a game once a player has started playing. But, she says, casinos can reduce the volatility of a game in a way that still preserves the overall payback percentage. That's technically still legal." Yeah, right... technically legal but that sounds totally rigged to me.
- adrianmsmith 12y ago
  That was the only thing I didn't quite understand in the article, what does "volatility of a game" mean?
  - spacefight 12y ago
    It might be realted to how you feel being on the winning/losing side while you play. If you give more wins in a shorter timeframe, the player will feel is on a winning streak even though the overall odds are the same...
  - shawabawa3 12y ago
    say the average payout is $0.75 per $1, instead of having a 1% chance of winning $75, and 0% of anything else, they could change it to 10% chance of winning $7.5 for example
- lewispollard 12y ago
  It's just changing the standard deviation of the prize payouts - doesn't affect the statistical return to player figure. So the average will still be eg 96% of the stake is won back - but the s.d. can be changed to pay out little and often, or rarely in big amounts, etc.
netcan 12y ago
I like the choice of 'story' or 'full interview.'

99 points by bennesvig 12y ago

From a software/hardware engineering perspective, how difficult is it to get into the slot machine game? I imagine it must have quite a rigorous set of guidelines and testing procedures that must be followed diligently to avoid running afoul of regulations set out by gambling states. Also, I assume it must require a lot of trade show visits to try and sell major casinos on your machine, since the number of customers for your machines is severely limited. Is it an upfront cost business (aka, they pay you $XXX for each machine) or is it more of a partnership with the makers where the casinos share profits on the machines with the developer/designers? Off the top of my head, I'd think the latter would be more feasible as I'm sure popularity of machines must be somewhat short lived, as there always seems to be different machines all the time. Anyway, I'm curious if anyone with more experience in this area could give some brief highlights on what it's like working in that arena. I've always been curious :)

joezydeco 12y ago
I worked in the business for a number of years and still have friends/colleagues that are there. From an engineering perspective slot machine design isn't very hard at all. It's pretty much video game design. There's a relatively recent CPU putting down images, playing back video, doing some light/sound choreography, and maybe doing some mechanical motion on some games. Let's put it as slightly more complex than Candy Crush but way less complex than writing Halo. There's also a mechanical component with artists and designers making cabinets, art glass, and wacky add-ons that sit on top or around the machine. The hard work in slot machine design is in the math of the slot machine. You're trying to design a game that balances something interesting on-screen with enough volatility that keeps players hooked. If you decimate their bank in the first 100 spins that player will never come back. One typical way to manipulate this is through the secondary games or bonus games that pop up on certain reel combinations. At first this was a way to work around certain patents (the most famous being IGT's Telnaes patent) and now players just come to expect various levels of extra action when certain slot reels are hit. Every player likes something different, of course. IGT's Double Diamonds reel-spinning slot is over 25 years old and players still look for it. The math also has to jive with the gaming board. Certain states will mandate minimum payout percentages, or a mixture of these that average a certain payout. (This is why dollar slots in Vegas pay way better than penny slots. As long as all the action in the casino averages to the legal minimum, they're okay). Your typical slot manufacturer has a number of math/stat MS or PhDs working out the numbers on paper as well as a testing department that tries to verify the math empirically. I'll say "tries" because some designs are so complex and non-deterministic or dependent on player choice that it can't be verified entirely on paper anymore. Almost all American jurisdictions employ independent gaming labs that inspect the code and verify the math as well before the slot is approved to release in a given state. If you can get approved in Nevada, you're usually good everywhere as a rule of thumb. And then yes, the theme of the slot has also become incredibly important. Licensing pop culture items (movies, TV shows, dead musicians, celebrities, etc etc etc) is a constant fight between the manufacturers to capture and leverage into a usable slot idea. Some think it is creatively lazy to grab the next hot movie and turn it into a slot. Some think that's what you need to do to attract people's attention in a visually crammed environment. C'est la vie. A slot machine designer worth his salt can mix and meld all of these things into an interesting game. New and different game mechanics are hard to come by, though. When something does hit, you'll see that model replicated dozens of times with slightly different math or new themes slapped on top of it. You throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. Business wise, up until a few decades ago, slots were sold by manufacturers and entirely owned by the casinos. In the last 20 years or so this has transitioned into a participation relationship where the manufacturers own, maintain, and operate the games themselves and share a percentage of the handle with the casino. This has made the business a lot more cutthroat because a streak of lousy games can get you kicked off a property (or corporation) entirely. This is the downside of throwing shit at the wall, so you test and test continuously at smaller properties. Participation also allows interesting game mechanics like multi-casino slots (like Megabucks) where the manufacturer is holding the jackpot in an interest-bearing account in their reserves. Think about that when the jackpot is in 9 figures and nobody has hit it for a year. Anyway, if you're really interested, the big companies are always hiring. These days it's IGT in Reno, NV and WMS in Chicago, IL. There are smaller companies here and there (Konami, Aristocrat, Mikohn) and then a constellation of independent design groups that consult and design games on spec for the big dogs. Most designers work their way up from programming games or designing art for slots but if you have any video game or casual game experience there's always room for new talent.
- jedberg 12y ago
  > IGT's Double Diamonds reel-spinning slot is over 25 years old and players still look for it. It's the only slot I'll play because it has the best pay table in the casino. It's the only one that pays 1600 coins for a 2 coin bet with sufficient payouts otherwise.
  - toong 12y ago
    Euhm, I don't know anything about slot machines, but isn't the (statistical) expected value not always about the same ? The payout-distribution could be different, maybe that's what you like about it ? (anecdotal: I calculated the expected value for a few games on a gambling site a few years ago and they were all about the same, for every game, for every size of bet: expected value was around .96 dollar for every 1$ bet. YMMV.)
    - lewispollard 12y ago
      That expected value is known in the industry as RTP - return to player - and is generally in the 85-98% range. Once a game is certified as having that RTP, it can't change - BUT the standard deviation can vary wildly from machine to machine, with some paying out little and often, and others having a more 'lumpy' distribution of not paying out much and then paying out large prizes every so often. High rollers will often go for these lumpier machines, staking large amounts and hoping for the elusive x1000 multipliers.
      - joezydeco 12y ago
        Very good point. But players should also know that a given machine can be released in multiple payout levels. You can have a row of identical games but the game in the middle could be set at 95% and the others around it set to 87%. And the casino doesn't have to identify which is which. Sometimes you can glean this from the payout tables, you can almost always glean it from video poker games. There's a voodoo science around how casinos are laid out and how games are arranged to maximize cashflow. You can get a degree in this at UNLV.
downandout 12y ago
The big issue isn't engineering, it's licensing. In the words of the attorney that helped me with a Nevada gaming license application, "They really want to make sure you're clean before they give you a license to steal". For example, if you went to high school in Hawaii, they will send two gaming agents to Hawaii - on your dime - to interview your high school teachers. The process is long and expensive. And that's just Nevada. You have to be licensed in each individual jurisdiction where your games will be shipped. This, of course, is all before you even broach the subject of putting your game on casino floors with slot/table game managers. As far as revenue models, both of those you mentioned are used. This also goes back to licensing - if you are only licensed as a manufacturer (a slightly less onerous process) then you cannot get a percentage of profits. You must have an operating license to obtain a percentage. This is why many table game manufacturers (3 Card Poker etc) get a flat fee per table per day instead of a percentage. The machine market is dominated by IGT and WMS, and good luck penetrating it. You may, however, be able to develop a fun game and license it to one of the big slot firms. Probably the easiest way.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  If you hang out at the back of the Global Gaming Expo (aka G2E), there are dozens of inventors in little booths trying to show off their new game and get you to try it. If you don't have a connection to a big company, this is one way to get discovered, but by judging what I've seen in some of those booths, you really have to have a compelling, easy, addicting game to get noticed. And most of those little guys have none of the above.
  - downandout 12y ago
    Anyone can demo any game they have developed, but before those games go into a casino, they must go through everything I said above. Many of those guys go to G2E to either get noticed by a larger manufacturer, or to find investors to help them go through the licensing process (or convince existing investors to do the same after a good response at the show).

leeoniya 12y ago

pardon the hijacking, but what's with this trend of everything above the fold looking like an entire complete page with almost no content? half the time i land on sites like this, i sit there for 5 seconds wondering where the hell the content is. the scrollbar is not that visible, guys. if i dont see partial content hiding at the bottom of the fold which would clue me into the fact that there's 10 more pages worth of scrolling, i'm not gonna "get it" by noticing a scroll bar. the pretty UI is not worth the horrid UX EDIT: i think repliers are focusing too much on scrollbar visibility. this isnt the main issue. i have no problem with the scrollbar being visible on other sites. it's plenty visible on my Win 8.1 / Firefox 1080p res. The problem is that A) i dont want to scroll an entire page before i begin reading and B) i dont want it to be the primary (and sole) indicator of additional content. I have to look over to the side to get the only cue, it's really annoying. /rant.

dm2 12y ago
I've noticed that too and also do not like it. I'd prefer the traditional style article and thumbnails where necessary (not just for the sake of cramming images into articles). Maybe they've done testing and this style article gets read/shared more, it certainly looks more official and permanent but it's still just a blog post / news article. This is where I first saw it, and it's annoying to read the huge text and adjust to the images that float under text: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-time-an-air-force-f-16-and-an-army-missile-battery-fought-each-other-bb89d7d03b7d https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-time-an-air-force-f-16... Apparently they never even considered what it would look like when someone tries to print that article, the 1st half of the page is a solid black image, then the text is laughably large.
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  That page you linked is horrendous!
  - dm2 12y ago
    This link from the same site is on the front page of HN today: https://medium.com/@sachagreif/in-the-past-couple-years-startups-have-started-realizing-that-good-design-can-make-the-difference-2fdeb90d390a https://medium.com/@sachagreif/in-the-past-couple-years-star... It's a decent article and fairly interesting (though not surprising), but the layout is like navigating a minefield, it's still better than the multi-page layouts that are common on some sites. Try to print this article though, 17 pages. 17 pages. Their main business is offering content in a format that is readable and accessible to users. One solution would be to have an alternate layout with normal sized text, no giant header image, and thumbnails rather than half-page images, and that layout preference would be both saved in a cookie and settable via a URL parameter.

GuiA 12y ago

I come from a country where casinos are much rarer than they are in the US, and I recently went in my first casino ever after living in the US for 4+ years. So I entered this weird place in Montana, with colorful machines everywhere. A more experienced friend instructed me to play a certain machine, in which I put $5 and got 100 virtual "tokens" in exchange. Then the machine asked me to pick 7 random numbers from a 10x10 grid. I touched the 7 numbers, and pressed a flashy "Go" button. The machine "randomly" (of course I have no certainty that it was truly a random process) picked 7 numbers, and only 1 of mine matched. Total gains: 0. I repeated the process several dozen times: select your numbers, press a button, watch the machine make funky sounds as it "randomly" selects number, see if yours match. The best round I got was when 3 of mine matched, and I got back something like 10 credits, going from 47 to 57. 10 minutes later, I was at 0. It strikes me as a tragedy of our modern society that such contraptions make for a significant portion of state income, and that they are as popular as they are. It is sad that the average American citizen does not have a sufficient grasp of basic probabilities to even consider putting money in such a machine, because it means that the school system essentially fails at preparing kids for the real world. And it is sad that governments are encouraging those temples for theft to prosper the way they do. Because it really is theft - just a kind of theft where the victim is coaxed into it with the help of smoke, mirrors, and free booze (not unlike the phone scams that prey on the elderly and manage to extract thousands of dollars from them). And not only is it institutionalized theft, it is institutionalized classist theft, as the vast majority of the victims are from the lowest socio-economical classes of society.

dm2 12y ago
There only in a few cities in the US where you can gamble like that, it's illegal in most places. Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Indian reservations, cruise ships, and casino boats are the only places I can think of that allow gambling in the US. I'm not sure if there is a loophole for horse racing tracks or how that works. Video gaming machines might be what you what you saw but they're really not much different than an arcade that spits out tickets. I think those video gaming machines are becoming more rare / illegal. Our brains aren't wired to correctly calculate the fact that we're more likely to lose than win. Same with lottery tickets, people get addicted to those things and don't stop until they run out of money. Even people in Haiti would receive a little money (meant to be used for food and other essentials) and spent it on lottery tickets.

unsignedint 12y ago

So some thought about this, as I used to be regular of a local casino, not because I felt I had to go, just to play with cash vouchers, they used to send, maybe occasionally putting in a 10 dollar bill or two. I didn't make money out of it, but I did not lose my own money. I guess when they realized they are not making money from me, they stopped sending me those vouchers... Bummer! :-) Those machines are really designed to salami slice players. You can play many of those machines from a penny per line, which equates to about 15 to 30 cents per play for full lines, depending on a machine. There are people who play at higher stakes, like a max bet of $2 per play, or even $5, but observing people, majority seems to be played at much lower bet of a penny or two per line, so I'm guessing they consists of high fraction of profit a casino is making from. It's fairly easy to lose a sense of spending when you are doing literally a thousand play per hour. (At 30 cents per play, You'd be spending fairly long time to spend $20, or even $10. At this level, a typical win would get you around $2 to $5, maybe $40 if you are quite lucky -- and perhaps real jackpot, being very, very rare, $200 or so.) Those "wins" really give you the joy that you'd anticipate for the next, and a lot of time, they'd put more money in just to anticipate another win, because when they have lost plenty of money, it's about a time they will start winning, right? Knowing someone who really got into it, one sign I started seeing from them is that they'd start making a statement like "I'm not playing it for money, I play it because the game is fun." He would play the game literally for hours per session, often visiting there multiple times a week. Usually ends up losing -- maybe the only good thing is that he'd have accumulated quite a bit of free restaurant credits. So if you are inclined to play, here's some suggestions, though for those people who would feel these suggestions are useful probably find the best is not to play at all: 1) Set a budget -- don't bring extra money. (And don't bring ATM card/credit card if you feel like you can't resist getting extra money out of them...) 2) Record every win/lose -- I've had Google Doc that keeps track of every wins/lose every machine. Every time I cash in, I'd record, every time I cash out, I also record that, that would give me balance sheet how much I'm spending/making. 3) Bet generously -- Don't bet a penny per line, go higher. You won't go anywhere with such low bet anyways. You'll have a better chance getting a better outcome going through that $20 in 2 minutes than spending 2 hours on it. Yeah, it may only last 2 minutes, but then you have good reason (See #1) to leave at that point -- and you are giving less chance for a machine to alter your psychology.

downandout 12y ago

All of this is interesting from an engineering perspective, but the reality is that casinos don't have to use engineering to get you to spend money. They rely on addiction for their income, and there's no evidence that better slot machine technology has swayed addiction rates one way or another (although TITO - ticket-in ticket-out - has made it easier to lose one's money faster). According to one study, 2.8% of the player base accounts for 50% of net casino win; the top 10.7% provides 80% of the win [1]. Without the very small percentage of their visitors that become addicts, every casino on the planet would cease to exist in short order. [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579123383535635644 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...

DanBC 12y ago
"Fixed Odds Betting Terminals" are in UK news quite often. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25619683 http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25619683 http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22934305 http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22934305 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27926213 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27926213 Glasgow has a population of about 600,000 people. Gamblers are not travelling to Glasgow - gambling is legal in Scotland so these machines are available in most towns. £200m is $336m

wmt 12y ago

Strange that adding smaller wins to slots has only just arrived, as such more complex betting systems have been proven to make playing feel more rewarding for decades. E.g. in Finland all supermarkets and roadside cafes have slot machines, and complex betting tactics described in the article have been there at least from the 1990s. They do differ a bit from Vegas slots, as the profits go to charity and the jackpots are ~50€, but still they are carefully designed to maximise the profits on the long run.

fiatmoney 12y ago

I would heavily recommend the book they mention ("Addiction By Design"). In addition to the bits about the casinos, there are a lot of fascinating insights into the minds of committed slot machine gamblers.

doomlaser 12y ago

The straight-up gambling industry relies on whales in an eerily similar way to many f2p games. From the linked WSJ article [1]: "The Bwin data also offer a peek at the economics of the casino industry that only insiders normally glimpse. Among the findings is an extreme reliance on revenue from a small number of gamblers. Of the 4,222 casino customers, just 2.8%—or 119 big losers—provided half of the casino's take, and 10.7% provided 80% of the take. Such revenue concentration long has been quietly acknowledged in the casino industry, but the Bwin information may be the first to show it with hard public data." Compare that to the f2p industry. From Re/Code in February [2]: "In a mobile monetization report released today, app testing firm Swrve found that in January, half of free-to-play games’ in-app purchases came from 0.15 percent of players. " "Some game companies talk openly about the fact that they have whales, but others shy away from discussing them publicly. It costs money to develop and keep a game running, just like those fancy decorations and free drinks at a casino; whales, like gambling addicts, subsidize fun for everyone else." [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579123383535635644 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610... [2] http://recode.net/2014/02/26/a-long-tail-of-whales-half-of-mobile-games-money-comes-from-0-15-percent-of-players/ http://recode.net/2014/02/26/a-long-tail-of-whales-half-of-m...

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hopfog 12y ago
I've worked in the industry for one of the biggest online brands and can second this. It was not unusual to see a single customer spend over a million euros. We even had a couple who maxed the account limit of 5 million euros and had to create a second one. These VIPs have their own account managers who often talk to them on a daily basis and they are given lot of gifts which are expensive (trips, luxuries etc) but nowhere near the sums they are spending.
- rebel 12y ago
  Very interesting information, but I can't tell which industry you mean as the parent was referring to both casinos and f2p games? I assumed f2p but I've never heard of account managers giving gifts in f2p games, that would blow my mind.

oscilloscope 12y ago

An interesting experiment in gambling addiction was the Bitcoin betting site Just-Dice. There were two ways to participate: 1) Choose your bet size and chance to win. The house always had a 1% edge, reflected in the payout. This edge is much lower than slot machines in Vegas. 2) Invest in the house. Every bet affected your bankroll based on your % invested relative to the total bankroll. The house edge was on your side. The operators of the site, Deb and Doog, encouraged anyone trying to make money to invest. They argued the expected value was positive, even though high-rollers sometimes went on winning streaks. Despite the warnings/statistics Doog produced and the fact that there was a +EV way to play (investing), players still got addicted to the dice game itself. The rolls resolved in a fraction of a second, so some players would go on a tear and bet 3-4 times a second. The minimum payout was 1% of the house bankroll, so single bets of several hundred bitcoin were possible. Several high-rollers ("whales") played for 14-16 hours straight in a state of intense "flow", generally winning early on and losing everything by the end. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoin (1000+ btc) lost in a single session. Sometimes coins would come out of cold storage to continue playing. The site had a chatroom where even investors encouraged the player to stop before they were ruined, but the players would generally deny addiction and continue rolling. After losing it all, some players described the experience they were having as a chemical rush- as if they had just taken a drug. Even users who were invested and had made sizable profits from investing were not immune to the lure of the game. Several withdrew their invested bankroll just to "play around" and fell in the same inevitable fashion.

logicallee 12y ago
>Even users who were invested and had made sizable profits from investing were not immune to the lure of the game. That is an insane level of product-market fit. Can you imagine if you got to claw back all of the equity you gave up at seed and Series A, because your investors wanted your product even more?
DanBC 12y ago
That's a deeply disturbing account of people knowingly exploiting vulnerable people to extract maximum money from them.

kens 12y ago

I read a paper a while ago that explained a bunch of tricky design that goes into slot machines. The odds of a particular symbol on a reel showing up aren't uniform - they use "virtual reels" behind the scenes. The reels are designed to show a lot of "near misses" where you almost win. They have a lot of partial "wins" that pay less than you put in. They "nudge" reels so it looks like you're getting closer to a win, but the odds don't change. They arrange the reels so you see a lot of "good" symbols, but not in places that actually help you. I'm not sure this is the paper I read originally, but it explains all this in detail (ignore the dodgy domain name): http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/PAR-Sheets-Probabilities-and-Slot-Machine-Play-Implications-for-Problem-and-Non-Problem-Gambling.pdf http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/...

Gusfoo_2 12y ago
> The reels are designed to show a lot of "near misses" where you almost win. That used to be true but is not any longer after the regulator cracked down. It wasn't the reel design (the strips are fixed) but instead the reel position value.

spacefight 12y ago

"Alternatively, Schüll discovered, some video machines actually make internal adjustments if they notice that a player is on a losing streak and is reaching their "pain point." This has to be done carefully — it's illegal for casinos to change the odds in a game once a player has started playing. But, she says, casinos can reduce the volatility of a game in a way that still preserves the overall payback percentage. That's technically still legal." Yeah, right... technically legal but that sounds totally rigged to me.

adrianmsmith 12y ago
That was the only thing I didn't quite understand in the article, what does "volatility of a game" mean?
- spacefight 12y ago
  It might be realted to how you feel being on the winning/losing side while you play. If you give more wins in a shorter timeframe, the player will feel is on a winning streak even though the overall odds are the same...
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  say the average payout is $0.75 per $1, instead of having a 1% chance of winning $75, and 0% of anything else, they could change it to 10% chance of winning $7.5 for example
lewispollard 12y ago
It's just changing the standard deviation of the prize payouts - doesn't affect the statistical return to player figure. So the average will still be eg 96% of the stake is won back - but the s.d. can be changed to pay out little and often, or rarely in big amounts, etc.

netcan 12y ago

I like the choice of 'story' or 'full interview.'