Did they used to all be so volatile and have these massive max payout potentials? Is it more that the RTP is all going to a few players rather than being spread out?
The best phrasing I've heard over the years is
suitably rare - the profile has certainly changed in recent years.
If we look back at a decade ago - something like Immortal Romance was your high variance beast and Dead or Alive or Break Da Bank Again were your ultra-high variance beasts.
Immortal Romance has a 12150x pay for a five wild reel Wild Desire - but 4 wilds will be around the 1000x mark, and 3 wilds can potentially hit the 500x mark (or land 3-4-5 and pay zero
). Beyond that, it's pretty rare to get above 500x - a substantial Wild Vine bonus perhaps.
Dead or Alive goes up to around 13000x for the dream bonus - contrast with 111000x of the modern successor.
Break Da Bank Again was all about the one big line hit - 5 gems, with wild, in the bonus was worth around 4000x. It was known as a spicy proposition and people would lower their bets when playing, fully aware a 15 spin bonus could pay literally zero.
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I would personally point to two events here - Bonanza with the 1 in 450 bonus frequency (which raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, when 1 in 150-200 was the norm) and then bonus buys as a whole. It's not uncommon now-a-days to hear of 1 in 500, 750 or 1000 frequency (every 40, 60 or 80 minutes at UKGC speed) - which makes for a miserably experience when playing slots designed for the bonus buy first rather than the whole experience.
When it comes to the streamers - not only do you have considerably more streamers, but they're spinning considerably faster - it wasn't unusual to see an old school streamer doing 500 spins an hour; when we're seeing 500x, 1000x, 2000x or more bonus buys... it's entirely plausible that an old school streamer would need
days or weeks to hit one - but the monopoly streamer can click a button.
Once the whole lure of "max win" (in my day, they didn't have max wins...
) took hold, providers followed the trend and the incentive to push more and more RTP upwards for "streamer wins" - combined with the triple whammy of more progressive jackpot contributions and lower headline RTP (house edge increasing from 3-6% to 4-12%)... makes for a much more brutal experience.
Personally, I still play a lot of the older slots at their original setting (if I can find them) - although my experience with "streamer slots" has given me a renewed interest in watching paint dry... it's more interesting!