Game providers

A slot is built by a studio and run by a casino, and the split between them is where most player confusion lives. The studio designs the mathematics: the volatility, the maximum win, the feature frequency, the range of return-to-player settings the game can be shipped with. The casino chooses which of those settings to run.

That last point is the one worth carrying around. The same title can return 96% in one lobby and 94% in another, with identical artwork and no notice anywhere on screen. Two percentage points sounds small and is not: it changes the house edge from 4% to 6%, which makes the same session cost half as much again.

These pages keep the two apart deliberately. A studio page tells you what the studio makes and which casinos in our catalogue carry it; the review of each casino records what that operator publishes about the settings it runs — which, in this market, is almost always nothing.

The lists on these pages label how we know a casino carries a studio's games, because the three ways of knowing are not equally strong and lumping them together is how comparison sites end up asserting things nobody checked.

"Title catalogued" is the strongest: a specific game from that studio recorded in that lobby by us. "Live tables counted" applies to live suppliers, and means the studio appeared in a count we took from the lobby page ourselves. "Operator's claim" is the weakest and the most common: the casino names the studio on its own pages and we have not verified it independently.

Most rows in this market would be the third kind at every comparison site, unlabelled. Distinguishing them costs us coverage — a claim we cannot verify stays labelled as a claim — and it is the difference between a list you can act on and a list that reads well.

You will not find company histories, portfolio sizes or laboratory certifications on these pages. Not because they are uninteresting, but because every one of those facts needs a source and a date to sit on this site, and we do not currently hold them.

What we publish instead is what can be checked in a lobby: the mechanics a studio is known for, its signature titles, and which of the casinos we rate carry them. That is a smaller claim, and it is one a reader can falsify by opening the lobby.

The RTP question sits underneath all of it. Where a studio publishes a range for a title, that range is a property of the game. What the casino runs is a property of the account you are playing on. We record the two in different fields and never substitute the first for the second — which is why a review will say "studio default, setting at this operator not published" rather than quoting a single confident number.

A casino is a shopfront for other companies' games. The lobby, the promotions and the account belong to the operator; the mathematics of every spin belongs to the studio that built the title, and that is where the properties players actually care about are decided.

Volatility, hit frequency, maximum win and the design of the bonus round are all set by the studio and are consistent across every casino carrying the game. If you like a particular feel — cluster pays, Megaways, a slow-building free-spin round — you are describing a studio's design language rather than a casino's lobby.

What the operator controls is which titles it carries and, on many games, which return-to-player configuration it runs. The same title can be shipped at several settings and the casino chooses, so the studio decides the shape of the game and the operator decides its price.

It is also the reason two casinos can carry the same game and pay differently on it: the title is identical, the configured return is not, and only one of those facts is visible from the lobby.

It also explains why a lobby of two thousand titles from three studios is a narrower proposition than one of eight hundred from twenty. Breadth of supply decides how many different kinds of game are available to you; the title count on its own mostly measures how many variations of the same few mechanics an operator has licensed.

That split is why this section exists and why each studio page lists the casinos carrying it with three levels of evidence — a title we have catalogued in that lobby, a live-table count we took ourselves, or the operator's own claim. All three are labelled, because they are not the same kind of fact.