Casino games
What is a slot machine payout?
Payout usually means return to player: the share of everything staked that comes back over millions of spins. A 96% title keeps four cents of every dollar.
It is a long-run average, not a promise about your session, and it says nothing about how the money arrives.
Three numbers, one word
Return rate is the long-run share. Hit rate is how often a spin returns anything at all, often around a quarter of spins. Max win is the ceiling, quoted as a multiple of stake, and on the modern titles we track it runs from a few hundred times up past fifty thousand.
A game can have a high return rate, a low hit rate and a huge ceiling all at once. That combination is the definition of high volatility and it is most of the popular releases.
What 96% does not mean
It does not mean C$100 becomes C$96. Money recycles: a hundred dollars staked through a series of small wins can turn over four or five hundred dollars before it is gone, and the return rate applies to the turnover, not the deposit.
That is why sessions feel worse than the number suggests. The percentage is honest and the arithmetic underneath it is the part people are not told.
Finding the real figure
The info panel inside the game, in the app you are playing in. Not the studio's press page, not a review, not the lobby tile.
About a fifth of the titles on our board are licensed in more than one return configuration. Where that is the case, the title page prints every published build rather than picking the flattering one.