Fruit Machine Chat

had a brief chat with a quiz machine guy today, i cant be sure of the relevance of this, or the accuracy of what he said,


i wasnt aware that the way the license's are paid for on the games is that they put a top-up card in the machine in a slot, more or less a creditcard/swipe machine...

the card had a number of 'credits' on, ie 13500 credits is a popular amount

each 50p game takes a credit, each £1 game takes two

the credits work out at about 5p or something,

so from your 50p, theres 5p for the license, 15(ish)p for the prize fund, and the rest is 'profit'

....

once the topup card gets low it can be set to start to shut off games that are less popular, or the ones that have paid out the most in prizes?? (sounds crazy to me)

the games/computer also keeps track of the amount of credits played on each game and once a certain amount of games is played from the topup card for that game, it can shut off the game (sound familiar???) this part the guy was unsure of the reason...

if you were to win too much from one game it might automaticly flag it and put it as unavailable, which has to be manually reset and cannot be done onsite..



i cant remember what make of machine it was the guy was servicing, but i thought id mention this incase people were interested...

I think that makes pretty reasonable sense to me. You wouldn't just release these things into the open without some sort of way to keep track of things.

Would be interesting to know what proportion of your 50p goes towards the percentage though. I see you mention 15p there, I'd hazard that not many players would think they are only contributing that to the 'pot' each game.