Words, a lonely five and a slider
Volatility (variance) describes how far the results of single rounds land from the average. How big that average is, you saw on the payout percentage shelf. Here the topic is the swing itself, and the fact that the lobby talks about it in at least four different languages.
BGaming uses a word scale running from ‘Low’ to ‘Very high’, with steps in between. Red Tiger and NetEnt also use words, such as ‘Medium’ or ‘High’. Greentube, the developer of Novomatic games, gives only a number, with no scale. And on the instant shelf there is often no rating at all: instead you get a risk or difficulty setting that you choose.
These four languages cannot be translated into one another.
Fact sheet for the risk shelf
| Feature | On this shelf | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| Word rating | BGaming, Red Tiger, NetEnt | Comparable only within one studio |
| Number without a scale | Greentube ‘5’ for Lord of the Ocean | You do not know the scale, so there is nothing to measure it against |
| Adjustable risk | Sugar Plinko (low/medium/high), InOut difficulty levels | Here risk is your decision, not a property of the game |
| Hit frequency | Published by only a few studios (NetEnt, Red Tiger) | It shows the rhythm, not the size of the wins |
| Max win | A multiple of the stake; not published for Novomatic | The ceiling hints at how much value sits in the rare peaks |
The same ‘High’, a seventeenfold gap in the ceiling
Three Red Tiger games carry the same label. Read only the word and they look alike – yet by the studio’s own data they are built very differently.
| Game | Volatility | Hit frequency | Max win | Mechanics in brief |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mega Rise | High | 12.95% | 6,375× | 3×3, 5 lines, rising multiplier bar up to 100× |
| Vault Cracker Megaways | High | 31.15% | 2,484× | Megaways, Cash Safes, Heist with sticky safes |
| Gods of Troy Megaways | High | 27.32% | 43,200× | 6×7 grid, 117,649 ways, Troy Spins |
The Gods of Troy ceiling is more than seventeen times that of Vault Cracker, while Mega Rise hits less than half as often as the other two. So ‘High’ is a broad bin, not a precise measurement. Of two games with the same label, the riskier one for you is the one where your budget covers fewer stakes relative to the ceiling and the rhythm.
Vault Cracker shows one more thing: its 31.15% hit rate is higher than the 25.00% of Fruit Spin, rated Medium. Frequent hits do not mean low risk.
Medium-low and Very high within one studio
Within a single studio’s own scale, ranking does make sense. The five BGaming games in this lesson cover the scale nicely.
| Game | Shelf | BGaming rating | Max win |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multihand Blackjack Pro | RNG blackjack | Low | – |
| Royal Roulette 500X | RNG roulette | Low | ×500, single number only |
| Jewel Boom Super Drop | jackpot game | Medium-low | ×3,000 |
| Piggy Bank Hold&Win | Hold & Win | Medium | ×2,500 |
| Book of Kemet | Books | Very high | ×7,500 |
Jewel Boom is a 3×1 single-line machine, yet it offers five fixed jackpots and Super Spins multipliers up to ×100 – a package the studio places at Medium-low. With Book of Kemet most of the value sits in the free spins round: ten spins with one random expanding symbol, and each retrigger adds another expanding symbol, up to nine. If that round keeps you waiting, the base game alone will not keep your budget alive.
The two Low table games are a reminder that the word applies to the game as a whole. On roulette the actual swing depends on the bet type: a bet on red pays 1:1, a single number 35:1, and in Royal Roulette 500X the ×500 lightning multiplier reaches single numbers only.
Rhythm on two classics: 25.00 versus 12.95
According to the studio, Fruit Spin (NetEnt, Medium) pays something on 25.00% of spins, and Mega Rise (Red Tiger, High) on 12.95%. Over forty spins that averages 10 and about 5 hits respectively. You will feel the difference: Mega Rise brings longer dry spells, while Fruit Spin drips out returns more evenly.
Returns smaller than the stake also count towards the hit rate: if 0.40 EUR comes back on a 1 EUR stake, that is still a hit.
If the studio does not publish this figure (as with Greentube and the Relax slots), do not guess it from how the game looks.
When risk is a number or a setting
Next to Lord of the Ocean, the Greentube page lists ‘5’ as the volatility. Whether that is the top of a five-point scale or the middle of a ten-point one is never stated, so we do not translate it as ‘high’ or ‘medium’. Against other Novomatic titles it may point in a direction – against another studio, never.
On the instant shelf, risk is often a setting. In Sugar Plinko you choose between low, medium and high, and you set the number of lines too. In the InOut Games title Stairs you pick a difficulty level, then decide step by step whether to cash out. In Twist three rings fill up for ever bigger rewards, with the risk of a ‘death symbol’. InOut publishes no volatility for either game.
So here you are not rating the game but your own setting. The details are on the instant games shelf.
Reading a risk level in five steps
- Check which studio made the game – the rating only makes sense on that studio’s scale.
- Find the volatility in the help screen or on the studio’s game page, and write it down word for word.
- If a hit frequency is given, note it as well and work out how many hits forty rounds bring on average.
- Read the max win and see what condition it needs (bonus round, full grid, single number).
- If the game offers adjustable risk, start at the lowest level and move up only deliberately.
Forty euros, two stake levels, one stormy machine
Worked example with invented values – independent of Dukat.bet:
Bence sits down with a 40 EUR budget at an invented, very high variance machine whose help screen gives a 15% hit frequency. He hesitates between two stake levels: at 2 EUR he would get 20 spins, at 0.40 EUR 100. How many hits can he expect on average in each case, and what is the chance that the 2 euro version brings no hit at all?
Solution.
- 20 spins × 15% = 3 hits on average.
- 100 spins × 15% = 15 hits on average.
- Chance of twenty losing rounds: 0.85²⁰ ≈ 3.9%, so on roughly one evening in twenty-five like this, the whole budget runs out without a single return.
The stake level does not change the RTP. It only decides how many rounds the machine gets to show what it can do – and with that, how much the whole session hangs on one or two random events.
Before you step up to a riskier shelf
- Are you comparing on the same studio’s scale?
- Do you know the ceiling and the condition it needs?
- How many stakes does your budget cover at the chosen stake level?
- In the instant game, which risk level have you set, and why?
If the budget question is still open, go through the limits toolkit; if you want to know where the swings come from, the special features shelf is next.