Feature purchases in slots: what the price buys and what stays the same

Short version first: a feature purchase swaps waiting for paying. Instead of spinning until a bonus round lands on its own, the player hands over a set multiple of the stake and the round begins at once. That trade is simple to describe and hard to price. Menus differ from game to game, several titles sell more than one round, the long-run return of each option is frequently missing from the paperwork, and some markets do not offer the button at all. Below, James Cooper sets out the published price lists from four games in the SlotSpecs database, does the arithmetic in virtual coins and summarises the regulatory history. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy. The aim is to show what the button actually changes.

What the numbers say at a glance

• Prices are always quoted as multiples of the active stake, so the coin cost grows with the bet size.
• Paying secures access to the round, never a particular outcome.
• The game’s max win cap applies to purchased rounds exactly as it does to natural ones.
• Separate RTP figures for each purchase are often unpublished.
• In 2020 the UK Gambling Commission told licensees to remove feature buy-in options.

Four real price lists, side by side

Each studio builds its menu its own way. The options below come straight from the reviews of four games in the database.

Sweet Bonanza 2500 by Pragmatic Play, in markets where it is offered:

Gates of Olympus 2500, also Pragmatic Play, lists 100x, 250x, 500x and 1,250x. Each price matches one of the four free spins modes that a wheel would otherwise pick during normal play, so buying means choosing the mode yourself.

Duck Hunters from Nolimit City charges 70x for Duck Hunt Spins, 200x for Hawk Eye Spins and 600x for Big Game Spins. A fourth option, the 235x Lucky Draw, hands out Duck Hunt with a 50% chance and each of the other two at 25%.

Pirots 5 from ELK Studios uses its X-iter menu: 50x for the Cursed Temple coin game, 100x for the regular bonus and 250x for the Super Bonus.

Two things repeat across all four. Pricier tiers pay for a better starting position, not a longer round. And a randomised option such as the Lucky Draw is a fee for a spread of results rather than a saving. At 235x it costs more than three separate Duck Hunt purchases, yet half of the time the result is a single Duck Hunt round.

How the coin cost scales

Because the price is a multiple, the stake does the real work. A 100x purchase on a 10-coin stake is 1,000 coins. Raise the stake to 50 coins and the same purchase becomes 5,000. Whatever the round pays is measured against that same stake, so the whole calculation moves up and down together.

The cap matters here too. Sweet Bonanza 2500 limits any round to 25,000x the bet. Paying 1,000x to enter means 4% of that ceiling has gone before a single spin, and a purchased round can still finish far below the amount paid for it.

The middle ground: pay more per spin

Not every option is a one-off purchase. Many games also let the player raise the cost of each spin to alter what that spin can do. These sit between normal play and an outright buy.

Super Spins deserve a second look. They remove the natural bonus completely and give guaranteed modifiers on ordinary spins instead. Duck Hunters pushes the idea further with Day boosters, one of which is a 3,000x spin where every grid position begins at an x1024 multiplier.

The missing figure: RTP per purchase

A slot’s advertised RTP usually refers to standard spins. Whether a bought round returns the same percentage is a different matter, and the studio often does not say.

• Our Sweet Bonanza 2500 review found no separate RTPs from Pragmatic Play for its three purchases.
• ELK Studios gives no individual figures for the Pirots 5 X-iter modes.
• Duck Hunters is widely listed with a feature buy RTP of 96.07%, a fraction above its best standard configuration of 96.05%.
• For The Dog House Megaways 1000, none of the sources checked gives separate figures for the 100x, 500x and 2,500x options.

When the number is absent, treating every purchase as equal to the headline RTP is guesswork. The true figure could sit a little above, a little below or exactly level. UK technical standards expect information about the likelihood of winning to be easy to find before play begins, so the in-game help screen is where any mode-specific percentage should appear.

The arithmetic in virtual coins

Treat this as a sum, not a strategy. In normal play Sweet Bonanza 2500 publishes a free spins frequency of about 1 in 450.57 spins. Assume a 10-coin stake.

• Letting it trigger naturally. Around 450 spins separate natural triggers on average, which is roughly 4,506 coins staked. That is not all lost, since base-game wins hand some of it back, and an average gap tells you nothing about when the next trigger will come.
• Paying to enter. The 100x option costs 1,000 coins and starts the round straight away.

On paper the purchase looks far cheaper, but the comparison leaves two things out. Base spins return coins as they go, and the studio prices the purchase around the bought round’s own long-run return, which, as covered above, is frequently undisclosed. Ante Bet 1 sits in between: the stake rises to 25 coins per spin while the trigger becomes roughly eight times as frequent.

Translate that to a SlotSpecs profile, which starts with 10,000 virtual coins. At a 10-coin stake, a single 1,000x Super Free Spins 2 purchase would use up the full opening balance, while one 100x buy takes a tenth. Watching a balance drain under repeated purchases is one of the most useful lessons free play offers, exactly because nothing of value can be lost.

The UK position since 2020

In January 2020 the Gambling Commission wrote to online operators after finding six licensees offering feature buy-in on slots. It described the option as raising serious social responsibility concerns and pointed to standards stating that products must not actively encourage customers to chase losses or increase their stake. All six withdrew the feature, and other licensees were told to remove games that offered it.

That history explains why so many database reviews carry the words "where offered". Trade reporting on Sweet Bonanza 2500 noted that its special bets and buys are limited to certain markets, and our Duck Hunters review records wide reports that its buy options are not available in the UK. A demo may therefore display a buy button that another version of the same game lacks. The guide to demo versus live versions covers other differences of this kind.

Six checks on any buy menu

1. Stake first. Every price is multiplied by it.
2. Tier guarantees. Look for minimum multipliers, sticky features or added spins.
3. Natural trigger status. Super Spins modes turn it off.
4. Mode RTP. If the screen does not show one, do not invent one.
5. The cap. Bought rounds are limited by the same max win.
6. A limit set beforehand. Purchases move balances fast. The guide to keeping play in proportion has practical ways to set one.

The bonus buy tag in the SlotSpecs database

A game receives the bonus buy tag only when its published record supports it, and the tag is never given to crash, table or card games. Having a purchase option earns no extra Spec Score points by itself; the Spec Score method explains how features are weighed.

Questions readers ask about feature purchases

Sources

• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/games-warning-for-online-operators
• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/standards/remote-gambling-and-software-technical-standards/rts-14-…
• gamblingcommission.gov.uk/standards/remote-gambling-and-software-technical-standards/rts-3-r…
• pragmaticplay.com/en/games/sweet-bonanza-2500
• pragmaticplay.com/en/news/pragmatic-play-turns-up-the-flavour-in-sweet-bonanza-2500