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What You Need to Know About Bonuses, Online Casinos, and Game Developers
Bonuses emerged from casino competition, serving as financial incentives to attract players. However, they pose financial challenges for casino owners due to unpredictable expenses from player wins. Bonuses come with numerous restrictions like wagering requirements and winning limits to minimize costs, often limiting players' enjoyment of the games. Despite these limitations, bonuses offer a way for players to engage more with games without spending their money, but their effectiveness and appeal can vary.
My Experience
I have worked in the gambling industry for about 20 years. My involvement has spanned developing games such as slots, card games, poker, and fixed-odds betting games. Additionally, I have experience working in customer support, payment services, and player communications. Of course, I also spend a lot of time playing various games myself.
About This Article
In this article, I want to briefly talk about what players want, what casino owners want, and how game developers exist between them. I will briefly discuss popular types of bonuses, their main parameters, how operators manipulate them and why. I will also express my opinion on what each party should aim for. I hope you find it useful.
The Parties Involved in the Gaming Process
Most players want to win money and try to maximize their chances in any way possible. Casino owners are typical businessmen who want to make money by providing service and access to gaming products. Game developers are those who create the gaming products we see on websites as individual games like slots, jackpots, card games, etc. At least three parties are involved in the gaming process, but in reality, there are more than 20 types and over 1000 functions. Let's not complicate things and stick to the three main parties.
Interests of Each Involved Party
Game developers distribute their games to all online casino owners, compete with other manufacturers in product quality, and their popularity directly depends on how much players like their games. All games are either strictly regulated by game rules. Some types of games, such as slots, use random and unpredictable result generators.
Casino owners create services and conditions for players so that they can play games on their sites as comfortably as possible. The better the service and conditions, the more popular the online casino becomes, as the games are practically the same everywhere.
Players are interested in their games, conditions, and services. Therefore, players always choose the best combination of available favorite games, playing conditions, and services.
How Money Moves Between Players in the Gambling Market
Players are the ones who bring in and spend money on the game.
Games are the main tool that distributes money among all three parties. The simplest way to understand the mechanism of money distribution by a game is to imagine that each time you place a bet, the game takes a certain percentage of the bet amount as if for servicing this operation. The rest of the money left from this bet is unpredictably distributed as winnings in the following bets among all players and all subsequent bets. And this all works on a large number of bets.
In the simplest example, when two players each make a bet of 10 euros. One player will lose and will have a balance of 0, the other player will win 9 euros and his balance will become 19. The game receives 1 euro as a percentage for servicing bets. This 1 euro is shared between the game developer and the casino owner. They will use this money to develop new games and improve their services.
The example is simple, but now everyone understands that if, for example, a game gives a win of x1000 from one dollar, it must receive this amount in lost bets + a percentage for servicing. Who and when will lose this is as unpredictable as who and when will win (but it will definitely not happen more often than once in 1100 games if we look at this statistic through a million games).
It's important to understand that since the distribution of winnings is unpredictable, there can be a situation where a player places a bet and can immediately win with a large multiplier. In this case, the game does not have the money to cover the expense as there were no other bets. Then the casino owner must put in their money. Thus, the casino can have a loss.
What Each Side Tries to Earn
Players think differently about what brings them to victory, but in fact, they all try to get into the small percentage of lucky ones who get a win with a large multiplier.
Games vary in many parameters, but the most important thing in a game is to ensure that each player feels that they will be in this percentage of lucky ones.
Casino owners think about how to provide conditions to players so that they think about nothing but the game and ensure that financial transactions are paid out in accordance with how the game distributes them.
First Conclusion
Everything is very simple, every player hopes that they are luckier and the game will pay them the money lost by other players. Developers and casino owners share the percentage received for servicing the game process and the movement of financial funds. Under these conditions, there is practically no conflict, and all parties get what the game product is tuned for. Players pay for the service and the opportunity to win a percentage of the bets, and developers and casino owners develop their products and services with this percentage.
For players, the biggest problem in this situation is finding their game (you need to try many different ones).
The Primary Sources of Problems and Conflict Between Casinos and Players: Bonuses
Where Did Bonuses Come From?
Bonuses are a product of competition among casino owners. As the number of casinos increased, they began aggressively luring players or trying to win them back.
Remember, the games are the same, the services are the same, and the main product is marketing, which has been poured over players' heads in the form of various bonuses.
As understood from the previous material, bonuses are not incorporated into the game settings, but they cost money for the casino owner. They serve as a financial incentive given to a player for switching from another casino.
Casino owners have to spend a portion of their % earned from servicing the casino also on bonuses and advertising to make players aware of them.
The Financial Problem of Bonuses
No matter what the bonus is and how it sounds, there's always a part of the money that is given to the player by the casino owner. Usually, this money is visible in the bets paid for by the casino owner.
For example, the Free Spins bonus. If you activate it, you make the number of bets paid for by the owner. Since the results of the games are not a predictable outcome and the game takes a % (which we simplified as a % for service) from all bets, the remaining amount goes to winnings. The casino owner begins to incur expenses or losses. Moreover, these expenses are unpredictable as the game unpredictably throws out large wins.
Therefore, the owner tries by all means to make this expense lead to a predictable result and the minimum amount of expense. As a result, bonuses sound tempting (because the player feels that if they are allowed to make bets in their game, they can wait for luck) but are not interesting because, for the most part, they do not allow enjoying the full set of possibilities that the game offers.
Why So Many Bonus Rules and Restrictions in Terms and Conditions
Let's take a few examples and show how luck is limited when using a bonus.
Free Spins - you are given 50/100/200 free spins, but in reality, at one casino, each bet can be 0.01 Euro, and at another, 100 euros. You, as a player, cannot assess the size of the bet by the name of the bonus. This significantly saves the casino owner's expenses because if such a bonus is distributed to 10,000 players, you can understand the amounts are not small.
Wagering Requirements - how many times you need to spin the given amount to have the opportunity to withdraw it from the balance. This parameter varies from x10 to x200. Who would be interested in spinning the win again to withdraw it?
Winning Limit - a working rule to make the costs of bonuses more predictable for the casino owner. It is usually said that the win will be limited to the amount of X euros if you use the bonus. 3% of players usually win large amounts in bonuses, and how happy are they afterward? No player is happy when their win turns from 10K euros to 20 euros.
Stake Amount Limit - a player feels the game and likes to change the bet size, sensing series of losses and wins (though this is unpredictable). They automatically want to change the bet, but the rules often prohibit changing the bet and limit the amount. Of course, the player is not happy.
There are a few more parameters, but we'll talk about them later. The more casinos there are, the more such restrictions because the earnings of casinos are not as large as is commonly believed, and not all casinos can easily survive unpredictable expenses.
Second Conclusion
Whether to play with bonuses or not is up to each individual. What bonuses definitely offer is the opportunity to stay in the game longer, making more bets. In my opinion, in most cases, using a bonus seriously limits the joy and pleasure of random wins, which, although rare, can be huge.
Bonuses provide additional opportunities to try and find your game without spending your own money, as you can only choose it by playing.
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