Every game card on SlotSpecs has the same three slots for data: RTP, volatility and max win. Some of those slots hold a dash (—). That dash is a deliberate part of the design, and since it appears across the whole site at launch, it deserves an explanation alongside the three figures themselves.
What each figure tells you about a game’s design
Artwork says what a game is about. These three numbers say how it is built:
- RTP (return to player): the theoretical share of all stakes the game is designed to pay back across a very large number of rounds.
- Volatility: how that return is distributed, spread across many modest wins or concentrated in a few big ones. Cards with a rating display it as a label beside a bar of six steps.
- Max win: the biggest award the design permits, given as a multiple of the stake.
Read together, they answer the first thing most players want to know: what sort of game is this? Two games can share a 96% RTP and still feel nothing alike if one is low volatility with a 1,000x cap and the other is extreme volatility with a 30,000x cap. RTP and volatility explained goes deeper.
Regulators think along similar lines. Great Britain’s technical standards require information that lets a customer make an informed decision about their chances of winning to be available before they commit to gamble, naming RTP, house edge or probability of winning as ways to provide it. Our games run on virtual coins only, but we see no reason a free-play site should show less.
The dashes in the launch catalogue
A dash means no figure has been confirmed. It does not mean zero, and it does not mean the game lacks that property. These are the launch cases:
| Game | Blank field | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| White Orchid | RTP and max win | No official IGT spec page found. A database gives an RTP range of 92.90% to 95.03% without naming the default, possibly because the 1,024-ways mode and the 40-line mode differ. Max win sources conflict. |
| Cleopatra | Max win | The commonly quoted 10,000x is a multiple of the line bet. No full-stake figure is verified. |
| Sugar Rush 1000 | RTP | Its main RTP differs between the studio’s page and a database. Pragmatic Play’s launch release does confirm the 7×7 grid and a 25,000x cap. |
| The Dog House Megaways 1000 | Volatility | Pragmatic Play publishes no rating, and the only database label we found did not match the design. |
| Aviator | Max win | Sources quote different maximums. |
How a figure earns its place on the card
Each figure in a game record has a named source. Our first choice is the studio’s own material: the game page, help file or launch release. If the studio publishes nothing, we fall back to a published game database, say so on the game page and link to it.
A figure also has to pass three checks before it is accepted:
- Max win has to be a multiple of the total stake, never of a line bet or coin value.
- RTP has to be the default build, not just the highest number we can locate.
- Features that belong to slots are never attached to crash, table or keno games.
Why a gap beats a guess
Filling every blank would be simple. We could plug in an industry-average RTP, convert a line-bet number into a stake multiple, or adopt the biggest number any site has published. Each shortcut would make a card look fuller and make it less accurate.
A blank also points you somewhere useful: the game’s own help screen, where studios usually state the RTP for that particular build. That matters because many games ship in more than one RTP version. When we know of lower builds, the game page flags that some sites run the game at a lower setting and lists the figures. Big Bass Splash, for instance, has 96.71%, 95.67% and 94.60%.
Scores follow the same principle. Without a confirmed RTP a game cannot be given a Spec Score, and how we rank treats it as unscored rather than scoring it on incomplete data.
How blanks get filled
Records change when a conflict is resolved or a studio releases a missing figure, and the new source is added to the game page when a dash is replaced. If you know an official source we have missed, the contact page goes to the editorial team.
For a catalogue-wide view, the RTP table gathers every confirmed RTP in one list, and how to read a paytable shows where each of these numbers sits in a game’s own screens.
