Compensation in Slots Bonus Games

Online slots have bonus games so that players have an opportunity of accumulating additional payouts without making any additional investment in the wager. This is a major attraction and it will be difficult to find a slot game of recent release without such a feature. But bonus games do not come easily. The alignment of symbols required to trigger bonus games occur infrequently. Therefore nothing can be more disheartening than triggering a bonus game but not winning any bonus credits or winning only a meager amount of bonus credits. Disappointed customers are bad for the industry and therefore slots game developers often include some sort of compensatory mechanism for players who have not won enough in bonus games.

There are two kinds of bonus games in online slots. One is the bonus game on the second screen. Mechanisms for compensation in such games have been incorporated in the past. However they are getting more frequent now. In January this year Microgaming released a slot game Robot Butler that had a fine example of a compensation mechanism. In the Robot Butler feature the player has to select one item from pipe, key and newspaper. The Robot Butler then fetches an item for his master. If the Robot Butler has got an incorrect item the player gets to choose again. If the robot Butler is successful in any of the two turns the player wins a bonus of up to 100 times the triggering bet. However if the Robot Butler fails both times the player does not quit the bonus game empty handed. He wins a consolation prize of 4 times the triggering bet.

The second type of bonus game is the free spins round. Often free spins rounds have multiplied payouts and additional wilds and are expected to provide hefty bonus payouts. Traditionally they do not have a compensation mechanism against poor payouts due to bad luck. Last month Realtime Gaming released a slot game called Hockey Hero that compensated for a poor performance in the free spins bonus round. This feature was given the name Win-Win Bonus Feature. This compensates the player if he wins only up to ten times the triggering bet in the free spins round. If the player wins more than ten times the triggering bet in the free spins round then the Win-Win Bonus Feature is not triggered. The payouts in the Win-Win Bonus Feature can be quite fancy and from this perspective it is perhaps a misnomer to call it compensation. For example if the player does not win anything at all in the free spins round, and this would be quite rare, he will get a payout of 200 times the triggering bet in the Win-Win Bonus Feature. If the payout in the free spins bonus round has been between 0 and 2 times the triggering bet, then a bonus compensation of 20 times the triggering bet is awarded. If the payout has been between 2 times and 5 times the triggering bet, then a bonus compensation of 10 times the triggering bet is awarded. If the payout has been between 5 times and 10 times the triggering bet, then a bonus compensation of 5 times the triggering bet is awarded. This feature is attractive and will definitely be used in the slot games to come.