If you asked 10 different slot players what their favorite games were, you’d almost certainly get 10 very different sets of answers. At the same time though, you’re quite likely to hear many of the same names repeated somewhere on the list.
So is there some magic formula that makes a slot great, or is it really just down to pure personal taste? This article will deconstruct all the key elements of these legendary slots and try to find the common factor.
The Slot Stats
For the more mathematically minded, slots essentially all come down to numbers, and there are a lot of players who don’t even glance at the design of a slot before checking out a few key figures.
Step one is most likely RTP, or Return To Player, which is a tricky one to compare for various reasons. The RTP of a slot is a little complex to fully explain, as it contains a lot of mathematical formulas and a lot of variables between casinos. For those who really want to know all the nuts and bolts, casino site MrQ’s guide on ‘How is RTP Calculated?‘ does a more thorough job of going through all the more fine details. For the sake of brevity in this article though, essentially it’s the average that a player can expect to get back from their wagers.
The reason that it’s harder to compare famous slots like Book of Dead or Dead or Alive 2 is that individual casinos can choose from a range when setting the RTP of their games. However, all the most popular slots that are commonly listed do generally come in at an RTP of over 96%, so it’s a safe guess that this does play a role in players liking them more.
The Theme
This factor is probably the quickest and easiest to write off, as there really isn’t much in the way of a pattern. Slots famously come in all flavors, even though there are a few tried and true ideas like the mysterious treasures of Ancient Egypt, and from our list of popular games alone, we’ve found that plus Vikings, Greek mythology, and more.
It isn’t even about having a strong theme in some cases. Starburst is consistently on the top of slot ratings and it has virtually nothing in terms of theme, being much closer to a classic slot than anything else, so we can immediately clear this one out.
The Bonus Features
So this is actually a much more interesting area to explore as slot games tend to make themselves unique via their bonus features. These modes have special mechanics that don’t appear in the base game and, in the best cases, don’t appear anywhere else either.
For Book of Dead, there are expanding symbols, Razor Shark has mystery symbols that give off serious Jaws vibes and Crazy Time has more special features than we can mention. In every case we’ve found, the most popular games are the ones with the most engaging and unique bonus rounds.
So that’s our conclusion at the end of this: players definitely do care about the numbers behind the games, but it seems to be the unique special features that play an important role in getting a slot to the top of the charts.
