Are All Online Slots the Same?

Slot machines are one of the newer forms of casino entertainment, being invented decades or even centuries after roulette, blackjack, poker, and other games.

Almost all casino games have several variants, and slots seem to have the most. You can categorize slots into many different types, and in this article, we will try to explain what those types are, and what makes every slot machine unique to an extent.

Land-Based and Online Slots

The first slot machine was built in the late 19th century, and for decades, slots were primarily seen in casino houses. These traditional slots had levers and mechanical reels, but you can rarely see one such slot today, except maybe in a museum. Modern slot machines are more like gaming stations, with games being projected onto a screen. They are usually called video slots nowadays.

With the popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s came first online casinos. By the beginning of the new millennium, you had hundreds of slot games that you could play on your computer. Today, that number is even larger, and apart from PCs, you can now play video slots on your mobile phones and tablets as well. Mega Casino slots offer one of the best collection of these online gambling games that you can play from either your computer or mobile device.

The Number of Reels and Paylines

Another thing that can make slots different from each other is the number of reels. Reels are vertical spinning lines filled with symbols. Slots of today usually have five reels intersected by three rows, but older ones had only three reels and one row. There is plenty of room for variety here — some slots even have up to seven reels or more.

Paylines represent the pattern in which a player needs to land identical symbols to win. Paylines are also often referred to as “ways to win”. There could be as much as 243 paylines in modern slots, while some games only have 10 or 15.

Fixed and Progressive Jackpots

If you manage to land the best possible combination of symbols in a particular slot game, you will get the maximum payout — a jackpot. Modern slots have two types of jackpots.

Fixed jackpots are predetermined, meaning that you know how much money you can win if you trigger one. On the other hand, jackpots that are labeled as progressive work a bit differently.

Each time you wager on a progressive slot, a certain amount goes into the collective pool that represents a total jackpot amount for that game. The jackpot becomes bigger each time a new player decides to wager and resets to zero once someone manages to win it. Because of this system, progressive slots can have jackpots that are worth millions. That’s why a vast majority of slot players like to test their luck on them.

While progressive slots are not as common as the regular ones, online casinos like Prime Slots UK, for example, offer both.

Payout Rate

It’s no secret that some slots are more favorable to gamblers than others, which has to do with their payout rate. Nevertheless, the margin between these rates is relatively small, and the rates are calculated by one million plays per game.

Every slot is made in such a way that the casino has the edge, which means that it’s basically programmed for the majority of players to lose. This and the fact that slots are played faster than other games makes them a primary source of revenue for most casinos.

Themed Slots

Gone are the days when slots only had fruits and numbers to represent the game’s symbols. With the advancement of technology and graphics, many slot developers started to come up with different themes for these games in order to attract a bigger audience.

That provided gamblers with an abundance of choices, as each player can now select a slot with a topic that he or she prefers. This is also one of the reasons why online casinos became more popular than land-based ones.

You can find a bunch of different slots featuring themes that take inspiration from movies, sports, music, ancient mythologies, and more.

What are you looking for?