What volume of play should be achieved before measuring the actual RTP?
Measuring a game with only a small amount of play will be pointless as the tolerance will be too large for meaningful results. On the other hand waiting for millions of game plays to occur might mean a game with errors is not detected for an unreasonably long time. The volatility of a game will detail the acceptable tolerance range and must be taken into account regardless of the amount of play accrued. In this way measurements can be performed at any time and the volatility derived tolerance will determine whether the game is performing as expected or not.
As one instance of a remote game will be released to potentially thousands of players the game will quickly accrue thousands of game plays, particularly if it’s a popular game offered by multiple remote casinos. In cases where the game is offered via a B2B supplier they will likely hold the aggregated win and turnover figures for all of the B2Cs offering the game to their customers.
It will be up to the licensee (often based on the game designer’s instructions) to determine the measurement approach and frequency. One approach could be to perform daily measurements based on the previous 30 days of play, which will ensure fresh data sets are measured as time progresses. Measuring months and months of activity could hide errors that have been introduced by new updates. A wider date range (for example, measuring a rolling 90 days of activity) could be measured in parallel so that a greater volume of play is considered (meaning the data will have a much finer tolerance).
Another approach instead of basing the measurement on a number of days could be to measure once X number of plays has been achieved. This would account for volume of play issue between popular and unpopular games.
The theoretical RTP is the centre line and the allowable tolerance above and below is represented by the green and red lines respectively and is determined by the game’s volatility. As more gameplay is achieved the actual RTP should be very close to the theoretical RTP.
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Other considerations for live return to player performance monitoring of games of chance
Last updated: 23 November 2023
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Removed reference to an example chart around how the actual RTP will be expected to align with the theoretical RTP based on the volume of play. Formatting changes