Divine Fortune

What these figures mean for Divine Fortune

Add up what NetEnt publishes about Divine Fortune and the numbers do not reach the total. The base game returns 58.62%. The bonus round returns 16.78%. Together that is 75.4%, and the game's stated return is 96.59%. So 21.19 percentage points — more than a fifth of everything this game gives back — are attributed to neither of the two components the studio names.

Of the games here where the studio names both components, that is the only one where they fail to add up. Dead or Alive 2 sums exactly: 68.6% base plus 28.2% bonus equals 96.8%. Every Nolimit City title that publishes a split lands within a hundredth of its total. Elsewhere a studio states one component and the remainder follows by subtraction — Punk Rocker names a 42.84% base and leaves 53.17 points unattributed, but it also names nothing else, so there is no contradiction to explain. Here two components are stated and they still leave a fifth of the return somewhere the specification never mentions. We are not going to tell you where, because NetEnt does not say. What we can say is that a player reading the base and bonus figures would badly misjudge this game: the part of the machine that holds a fifth of its payback is invisible in the specification.

The rest of the numbers describe a game that is stingy by the standards of its studio. The hit frequency is 20% — the lowest of the ten NetEnt titles here, just under Aloha Cluster Pays at 21% and less than half of Blood Suckers' 45%. The base return of 58.62% is the second-lowest NetEnt figure in this catalogue after Finn and the Swirly Spin's 50.7%, and it sits inside Nolimit City's 55–61% range rather than near the 65.3% of Gonzo's Quest or the 68.7% of Starburst. One spin in five pays, and when it does you are in a base game returning under 59p in the pound.

And yet the total is 96.59%, which is above the catalogue average of 96.43%. That combination — low hit rate, mean base game, decent overall return — is the signature of a game that keeps its value somewhere specific and occasional. In a Nolimit City title you would know where, because the studio publishes the bonus share and the odds of reaching it. Here the bonus is stated at 16.78%, which is far too small to account for the shape, and the remaining 21.19 points have no published home at all.

The volatility index of 6 is mid-table here, between Steam Tower's 5.7 and Twin Spin's 6.5. It is a modest figure that sits oddly with a 20% hit rate, and the two together point at the same conclusion as the arithmetic: whatever holds the missing fifth of this game's return pays rarely enough to depress the hit frequency without making the measured dispersion extreme.

The bonus figure itself is the smallest published share in this catalogue, and by a wide margin. Where a split is stated, the bonus carries 40.41 points in Karen Maneater, 40.08 in Tombstone R.I.P., 37.98 in Deadwood, 36.29 in Das xBoot and 28.2 in Dead or Alive 2. Here it carries 16.78. So this is simultaneously the game with the meanest published bonus share and the game with a fifth of its return unaccounted for — two facts that would resolve each other if the studio named a third component, and it does not. Any story a reader might construct about where the missing 21.19 points live would be exactly that: a story.

The ceiling is 1,000x, the same as Steam Tower and Twin Spin, and there is no feature buy — normal for NetEnt, where only Dead or Alive 2 offers one. There are also no published odds on anything: not the 1,000x, not a 100x, not the trigger rate of the bonus. For a game whose specification already leaves a fifth of the return unexplained, that absence compounds rather than merely disappoints.

For a player, the practical effect of the gap is that the usual way of judging a slot does not work here. Normally you read the base return to know what ordinary play gives back, the bonus share to know what you are waiting for, and the two together account for the headline. On this game they account for three quarters of it, so the ordinary reasoning produces a picture that is missing its largest unexplained piece.

The summary: a game with an above-average return, the lowest hit frequency and the meanest base game NetEnt has on this site, and a published breakdown that accounts for only three quarters of what it pays back. If you play it, you are playing a machine whose most important component the studio has not described, and the honest version of this page is to say exactly that rather than to fill the gap with a plausible story.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures NetEnt states for Divine Fortune itself — not our estimates.

How Divine Fortune 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.