Slots Are Growing In Popularity

07.21.2008 | 9:51 pm | Slots, casinos

Casino industry reports today revealed that the popularity of slot machines continues to grow year after year, having brought in $20 billion last year to the USA. This total is higher than the revenue provided by other popular goods, for example movie ticket sales, book sales and coffee sales, demonstrating just how profitable slot machines are becoming to the casino business. Furthermore, this trend has recently shown signs of crossing the Atlantic divide - in the UK, the slot machine phenomenon is flooding the online gambling market, with the company Vernons.co.uk reporting a tenfold increase in players over the last six months.

The appeal of slot machines to the casino industry is based on the certainty of profit-making, thanks to the computer chip at the centre of the machine – the Random Number Generator (or RNG). This is programmed to produce a certain ‘hold’ for the casino over time, called the hold percentage – and most slot machines in casinos now average hold rates of 10 to 15 percent. Legally, the maximum hold rate for a slot machine is 20%, or no more than 20 cents per dollar taken, with a beneficial hold percentage from a slot user’s perspective at around 6%. The figure of a 10 to 15 percent hold rate is therefore almost guaranteed to bring in revenue for a casino.

The casino industry has become increasingly dependent on “slots”, with statistics from Illinois revealing that slot machines brought in 88% of casino revenue last year. Part of the phenomenon can be explained by the figure that slot players lost $1.7 billion at casinos last year in Illinois alone. Additionally, the increasing popularity of slot machines heralds a boom in employment, with a projected increase of 23% in the next 8 years in job opportunities in the gaming services market.