In many ways I admire RAW Gaming because they're trying to do something new, trying to innovate. It's risky but if you come up with something good and get it right then you're sorted.
Anyone can start a studio up and churn out rip-offs of other peoples' slots, look at Reel Kingdom - a Fishing Frenzy clone with a trail nicked from Reel King Megaways bolted on, rehashed to fuck, and everything else they've come up with is shit including any Book of Ra / Eye of Horus copies they've done. Once the Big Bass well has run dry and they stop adding value Pragmatic will fuck Reel Kingdom off. Apparently the Design Director there is one of the biggest parasitic chancers in the entire industry and it's reflected in their games.
Fair play to RAW Gaming for having a go I say. I'm not a massive fan of their Slice games or that Blackbeard's Compass (you have to look in too many places at once) but that Popeye slot is pretty good, and Big Money Bass isn't too bad either in its own way. People rip the piss out of Supertracks Railways but that game shows genuine innovation and a lot of thought has gone into it; a proper game designed from the ground up instead of taking a slot that's already been designed for you like Book of Ra, changing the book from red to blue and calling yourself a Creative Director like a complete cunt.
I genuinely hope they crack it with one of their future games and the same goes for any other studio who are trying something new and exciting that hasn't been done before; it's these guys that drive innovation and the industry forwards - look at the likes of Netent and WMS 10 years back, they were knocking out some ground-breaking stuff and players were captivated.
RAW have a big problem, they are forcing too much of their slots by quantity instead of quality.
They try to innovate but they lack the basics, starting with their worst concepts, the slice games.
If they wanted to make something like that, at least make the visual representation more accurate with the reality of probabilities, they made wheels with 12 slices, where you have 10 wins vs 2 losses and it hits the loss 90% of the time, multiple times in a row.
They focused too much on the Near Miss concept that they made the player lose all interest because of the lack of basic probabilities.
Then, another example is Wheels of Rock, they did the same thing with the Mag Spin feature.
It always hit the multi after one of the highest ones, just to implement the Near Miss theory, as an example, a wheel with 6 slices, 3x, 15x, 100x, 1000x, 250x, and 30x, will always hit the 30x.
Now regarding their newest games, they lack a lot of volatility for their payout, the payouts are kinda bad and they lack a lot of volatility, everyone saw that in yesterday's Mega Free Roll, over 500.000 spins were done and only 1 person hit around 1000x? That's too bad for the current market.
And one live example of how volatility can make a brand is Wanted Dead or a Wild from Hacksaw Gaming, before this slot, almost no one knew them, but when people started seeing the potential and how high the volatility was, they started getting fans after fans and today they are one of the top providers, all their fame came from that slot which allowed them to snowball into what they are today.
Does same on VS and MRV
.. thats the reason because it cant pay anything
Imagine how much they are saving by having 50%+ of freerolls being on their own slots
