Dead or Alive 2

What these figures mean for Dead or Alive 2

NetEnt rates the volatility of Dead or Alive 2 at 9.9 on its own index. Nolimit City rates Punk Rocker at 9.96. On the measure both studios publish, these two games are six hundredths of a point apart — effectively identical dispersion, from studios whose portfolios otherwise sit at opposite ends of this catalogue. What they do with that identical number is the most instructive comparison on this site.

This game pays 68.6% from its base game, the second-highest base return here, and tops out at 1,600x. Punk Rocker pays 42.84% from its base game — the lowest on the site — and tops out at 15,072x. Same measured volatility; one game keeps you in a reasonable-value base game with a modest ceiling, the other strips the base to fund a top prize nine times larger. If you take one thing from this page, take that: the volatility index tells you how uneven the ride is, and nothing at all about where the game has been engineered to put its money.

The split here is unusually clean. NetEnt states 68.6% base and 28.2% bonus, which sums exactly to the 96.8% headline — a tidiness worth noting, because for most games in this catalogue the two published figures leave a remainder we have to flag. So a little under three tenths of everything this game returns arrives through the free-spins round, and seven tenths through ordinary play. That is a gentler structure than any Nolimit City title here, where the bonus routinely carries 36 to 40 points of the return.

The hit frequency is 30%, so roughly three spins in ten return something — between the 28% of Twin Spin and the 41% of Gonzo's Quest, and unremarkable in itself. At 96.8% the return sits fifth on this site, behind Blood Suckers, Steam Tower, Jack Hammer and Gemix. Of those, the three whose dispersion NetEnt publishes are all gentler than this game — 2.7, 5.7 and 3.8 against 9.9 — and for Gemix no index is published at all. So among the games here returning more than this one, none is known to be as uneven, which is an unusual combination: a high return and a lumpy distribution usually do not travel together. The number that makes this game feel different from its hit rate is the 9.9 index: the highest NetEnt figure in this catalogue, well above the 6.7 of Gonzo's Quest and the 2.7 of Blood Suckers. A 30% hit rate with that dispersion means the returns are lumpy — frequent enough to keep a session moving, uneven enough that the balance does not drift gently. The free-spins round, with its sticky wilds and multipliers, is where that unevenness lives.

This is also the only one of the ten NetEnt games in this catalogue for which the studio records a feature buy. Among the Nolimit City titles here a buy is standard on every single one; from NetEnt it exists in this game and nowhere else, and it exists precisely because 28.2 points of return sit behind a round that ordinary play reaches slowly. Unlike Nolimit City, NetEnt publishes no odds for how often the round arrives, so the one figure that would let you judge whether a buy is priced fairly — the average number of spins it saves you — is not available. We have not checked the price at any operator either. What can be said is narrower than usual: the buy skips the better-value part of this particular game, since at 68.6% its base return is the second-highest here, which makes the case for buying weaker than in a game like Punk Rocker.

What is missing from the specification is the same thing missing from every NetEnt title on this site: probabilities. No odds on the 1,600x, no figure for how often a 100x lands. For the Nolimit City games we can print "a 100x win arrives once in 1,789 spins" because the studio states it. Here the honest answer to how often this game pays enough to matter is that NetEnt does not say, and the difference between the two studios is disclosure rather than design.

The summary: a game with the second-kindest base return in this catalogue, a clean 70/30 split between ordinary play and the feature, a ceiling that is modest next to anything from Nolimit City, and a dispersion index matched exactly by a game nine times more extreme at the top. The 1,600x is the clearest marker of where this game sits — the studios it now competes with sell ceilings in the tens of thousands, and this one does not try. Whether that is a drawback depends on whether a 15,000x headline was ever going to pay you anything.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures NetEnt states for Dead or Alive 2 itself — not our estimates.

How Dead or Alive 2 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.