Blood Suckers

What these figures mean for Blood Suckers

Blood Suckers returns 98%, the highest figure in this catalogue, and that single number is the reason it gets recommended and the reason the recommendation is usually wrong. A 98% return does not mean the game gives you more money. It means that of everything staked on it, over a very long run, 2% stays with the house instead of the 3.57% kept by the average game in this catalogue, whose mean published return is 96.43%. The difference is real and it is small: on £100 staked it is £2 rather than £3.57. What decides whether you enjoy the game is not that gap, it is the shape of the return — and NetEnt publishes the figures that describe the shape.

The volatility index is 2.7, the lowest of any game in this catalogue and a fraction of the 66.85 that Nolimit City publishes for Tombstone R.I.P. The hit frequency is 45%, which is extraordinary in context: nearly one spin in two returns something. For comparison, Starburst — the game people think of as gentle — pays on 23% of spins, and Tombstone R.I.P. on 9.08%. Blood Suckers pays about twice as often as Starburst and five times as often as the Nolimit game.

That 45% is the whole product, and it is worth being precise about what it buys. The ceiling is 900x your stake. On a £1 spin, the best outcome this game can produce is £900, and it is the only outcome at the top of the range — there is no tail above it. Compare that with the 11,757x of Karen Maneater or the 300,000x of Tombstone R.I.P., where the entire design points at an event you may never see. Blood Suckers has no such event. Nearly every spin that pays, pays small; the money comes back in a long sequence of fractions and modest multiples; and because the top prize is capped so low, no single spin can rescue or transform a session. The 98% arrives in crumbs, reliably.

The practical consequence is session length, and it is the only honest reason to choose this game. If you stake £1 a spin on a game at the catalogue average of 96.43%, the mathematics of the long run takes 3.57p per spin from you; here it takes 2p. Combine that with a 45% hit rate and a shallow distribution, and a given balance survives measurably more spins than it would on anything else on this page. That is what you are buying: time at the machine, at the lowest cost per spin available in the catalogue, with the near-certainty that nothing dramatic will happen in either direction. For a player whose purpose is to sit with £20 for an evening, that is a genuinely better product than a game with a bigger headline. For anyone hoping a session ends with a story, it is the worst choice here.

One feature of this game is a notable absence: NetEnt does not sell a feature buy for it. Every Nolimit City game in this catalogue does, and every one of those buys is a way of skipping a base game that returns somewhere between 42.84% and 61.07% in order to reach a bonus round holding a third or more of the total return. Blood Suckers does not have that structure to skip. It has a bonus mode, but the 98% is not stacked behind it in the way those games stack 40 points of return behind a round that comes once in two hundred spins — and with a hit rate of 45%, there is no long barren stretch to pay your way out of. There is nothing to buy because there is nothing to wait for.

What NetEnt does not publish for this game is the thing Nolimit City does: the odds. There is no stated probability of hitting the 900x, no figure for how often a 100x spin arrives, no breakdown of how much of the 98% comes from the base game and how much from the feature. For the Nolimit City titles on this site we can print "100x or better once in 755 spins" because the studio states it. Here we cannot, and we are not going to estimate it. That is a difference in how two studios disclose, not a difference between two games, and it is worth knowing which kind of studio built the game in front of you before you treat a published RTP as the full story.

There is one caution specific to this game, and it follows from the 98% itself. A return that high is expensive for an operator to run, which makes it exactly the kind of figure worth confirming in the game information panel before you play rather than taking from a review. We hold no record of a lower-RTP build of Blood Suckers — NetEnt publishes a single return here — but "the studio certifies one build" and "the copy in front of me runs it" are different statements, and only the first is something we can show you.

The summary is a game of two numbers pulling in opposite directions. The 98% is a genuine edge over everything else in this catalogue, worth about a penny and a half in the pound against the average here, and the 2.7 volatility index with its 900x ceiling is precisely what that edge costs: a game incapable of a memorable outcome. Recommending it for the RTP alone, which is how it usually gets recommended, gets the product backwards. It is the right choice for a small balance and a long evening, and the wrong one for any other reason.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures NetEnt states for Blood Suckers itself — not our estimates.

How Blood Suckers compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures. NetEnt lists this title as certified for UKGC.