In present times, innovation has become a buzzword and tossing identifiers like “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary” has become a bit too easy.
The ever-expanding online casino realm is no different. Slots reign supreme there and new concepts aiming to spice up the experience offered by these highly entertaining games are introduced constantly with great fervor.
But how many of the new concepts introduced in recent years have been truly game-changing? Not many. It’s not that they haven’t contributed to the growth of the sector, but as we said, we have sort of lost sight of what coming up with a revolutionary product is really about.
In 2016, casino games developer Big Time Gaming (BTG) rolled out its Megaways engine, which actually had a ground-breaking effect on the slots vertical. It rocketed the studio into the spotlight and saw big-league casino content makers gasp in awe and clinch licensing deals with it that enabled them to incorporate its innovation into their titles.
But what’s so special and unique about the Megaways mechanic? Well, here’s a bit more about it and how it propelled the pendulum of innovation within the slots-making industry to move.
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A Few Words about the Studio
Big Time Gaming was established in Sydney, Australia in 2011. Before it debuted its ground-breaking solution, the studio was a relatively small one, particularly when compared to big guys like Microgaming and NetEnt (which is now an even bigger guy after it was acquired by Evolution in 2020).
However, BTG’s work has always had a great impact on the industry as the games maker has since inception aspired to bring something new and fresh to the market. Mass-production has never been its thing, but it has made sure that every game it rolls out has an element that makes it unique.
Product development…
… is clearly carried out by a team of people who know what players are looking for and is overseen by a team of industry veterans. The company’s CEO, Nik Robinson, has been part of the world of iGaming since its early days in the 1990s. He founded New Tech Media which was sold to News Corp and later merged with Orbis to become sports betting technology powerhouse OpenBet. The latter was acquired by NYX Gaming in 2016, which is now part of Scientific Games.
After the introduction of Megaways in early 2016, the Australian studio gained overnight fame and its product quickly garnered attention, praise, and high demand among both fellow game makers and players.
And here’s why.
What Is Megaways Exactly?
Megaways is a slots engine or a random reel modifier, to be more specific, that changes the number of symbols that land on each reel during a spin. In other words, every time a player hits the spin button in an online slot featuring this system, a different number of symbols will hop onto each reel. This provides tens or even hundreds of thousands of ways to win.
In general, things sound a bit complex and confusing, but in reality it is all pretty simple. A standard slot equipped with this engine can feature five or six reels and between two and seven symbols (sometimes even more) per reel. The number of icons that land on the reels is randomly determined by the engine and differs from one spin to the other.
This creates numerous opportunities..
… for a win. Ways to win are usually capped at 117,649, that’s how many the original Megaways slot – Dragon Born – featured (we are going to talk about it later in this article). You’ll get that many ways to win if you play a six-reel slot and seven symbols appear on each of these six reels.
Every spin coming with a random number of winways also has an effect on the game’s winning potential. If, for example, seven symbols appear on all six reels of a game, players can land wins of up to 50,000 times their bet. That paired with multipliers and other features added to the game can generate even larger prizes. No wonder this engine has become an instant success and has had such an enormous impact on global slots-making.
But How Do You Win on Megaways Slots?
In order to win, you need to have at least three matching symbols on consecutive reels starting from the leftmost one onwards. Unlike classic slots games, here you don’t have paylines, so symbols can be located on any row and still form a winning combination.
And since you can potentially end up with a 6×7 layout…
… with all that space, you can have more than one winning combos with different symbols within a single spin. It is similar to the classic winways scenario, but you have way much more going on on the screen.
If you feel a bit confused about paylines, winways, and how these differ from BTG’s Megaways concept, we recommend that you read this article on our sister site LCB.org. It makes things much clearer and easier to comprehend.
At the time when Megaways was introduced, the wider slots market believed that players saw slots with big symbols of greater value. BTG very much challenged that perception by introducing an engine that produced thousands of ways to win with smaller, sometimes minuscule, symbols.
How to Calculate How Many Ways to Win a Megaways Slots Offers?
Most Megaways games display the number of ways a player can win during each spin in a box somewhere above the reels. This is pretty convenient, particularly when there are thousands of ways a win can be generated and the player finds it a bit difficult to keep up with the math.
But…
… if the game doesn’t display the number of ways to win, you can calculate them by multiplying the number of symbols on reel one by the number of symbols on reel two. You will then multiply the sum by the number of symbols on reel three and so on until you reach the final reel.
So if you have seven icons on each of six reels, you will have to do the following:
7×7=49
49×7=343
343×7=2,401
2,401×7=16,807
16,807×7=117,649
or
7x7x7x7x7x7=117,649
However, don’t be quick to lift up your expectations, because you’ll not get that many ways to win with every spin.
Winways in Megaways slots are usually capped at 117,649, but sometimes developers go even higher. BTG’s own title Holy Diver Megaways offers whopping 586,981 ways to win. Other developers opt to reduce the winways. For example, Games Inc. went to as low as 512 with its Joker Megaways title.
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Megaways and Other Features
Aside from the huge number of winning combinations that can be formed on the reels, another area where BTG’s revolutionary engine proves extremely worthy is in the variety of additional features it can be paired with.
Some of these are:
Cascades
An avid slots player is familiar with this concept that sees the symbols that form a winning combo during a spin disappear from the grid to make room for new ones to fall down into their spots. This can create a chain of consecutive wins from just one spin, which is pretty great to say the least.
Progressive Win Multiplier
This feature makes the above discussed mechanic even more thrilling. If a multiplier is included, it causes winning combinations to multiply for each subsequent cascade. In other words, the more cascades you have within a spin, the higher the multiplier will go. In base game, the win multiplier usually resets to x1 after the spin ends, but during Free Spins, it may not reset and keep going up until you finish your bonus spins.
Wild Multipliers
These Wild symbols further spice things up when combined with the Megaways engine as they multiply the win if they are part of a winning combination.
Original Megaways Slots
As we mentioned above, Dragon Born was the first game to be equipped with this intriguing engine. The slot was released in early 2016 and quickly attracted the attention of providers, operators, and players.
Prior to this game’s roll-out, both online and land-based slots offered no more than 4,096 ways to win. Still good, but not as good as Dragon Born’s 117,649.
The game, a Medieval epic with nice and vibrant graphics and accompanying soundtrack, features six reels. Up to seven symbols can land on each of them. The slot offers medium-to-high volatility and a wide variance across the paytable.
Full-reel Wilds…
… further enhance the title’s win potential as they can count as up to seven icons and substitute for all other icons but the Scatter. These Wilds can also multiply to up to x7 any winning combination. And if you have multiple Wild Multipliers forming winning combos, they multiply each other. For example, if there are two Wild Multipliers with x7 multipliers on the reels, they would multiply any win by x49.
While Dragon Born was the original Megaways title and it captured quite some attention, it was Bonanza that really saw BTG’s popularity explode and put the company’s iconic mechanic on the map.
This game features six reels with up to seven symbols. Four minecarts roll above reels 2, 3, 4, and 5, each carrying a symbol that can help form a winning combination. With cascades, Free Spins, retriggers, and unlimited multipliers during free spins, this slot demonstrates how far developers can go with boosting the Megaways engine and has become a benchmark for subsequent releases equipped with it.
Now, it is important to note that almost all BTG titles tend to be on the higher end of the volatility spectrum. So, don’t expect to hit a win too frequently, but when you do, it can potentially be pretty hefty. In Bonanza, for example, the Megaways engine combined with all the game’s features may result in a win of up to 12,000 times the stake.
Other Popular Megaways Titles
We can’t write about popular slots featuring this engine without mentioning the one with the highest RTP. From the entire Megaways series, BTG’s White Rabbit release seems to have the highest return to player at between 97.24% and 97.77%.
Of course, calculating the RTP of Megaways games is a bit more difficult than the one a traditional slot holds, because with the former the active ways to win change with every spin, while with the latter, the same number of winways are in action during every spin.
Back to White Rabbit, this five-reel game offers up to 16,807 winways during base game and up to 248,832 winways during Free Spins where each reel can expand to up to 12 symbols. The five reels can host between 2 and 7 icons during base game.
The slot’s standard Wild substitutes for any pay symbol on the grid, while its Bonus Wild can multiply winning combinations by x2 or x3. White Rabbit also offers players the opportunity to take advantage of the Feature Drop option and pay to trigger the Free Spins feature, instead of waiting for three White Rabbit Scatters to land on the reels.
The original buzz that the release of Bonanza generated only kept growing and many casino game makers teamed up with Big Time to jump on the Megaways bandwagon and develop their own titles enhanced by this mechanic.
Blueprint Gaming was one of them. And the studio’s Vikings Unleashed title quickly joined the ranks of the popular Megaways titles for several reasons. In the first place, the company crafted a beautiful tale of vikings with exquisite graphics and a tune that lifts the player’s spirits to a heroic level.
The game is designed to offer up to 117,649 ways to win across six reels that can accommodate between two and seven symbols. Cascades, a mystery symbol that transforms into any other symbol except the Scatter, and an unlimited win multiplier during Free Spins are only a few of the special features that are added to enhance the already massive win potential that the Megaways system offers.
Pragmatic Play was, too, tempted by the potential of the Megaways system and acquired a license to produce titles that feature it. Great Rhino Megaways, an enhanced version of its Great Rhino title, came out in 2020 as its first to have the engine.
The game features six reels that can host up to seven symbols each. An additional row above reels 2, 3, 4, and 5 adds to the game’s win potential and boosts its winways to 200,704. Tumbling (or cascading) reels create opportunities for even more generous wins. The Free Spins game comes with an unlimited multiplier which increases by x1 after every tumble, that is to say after a winning combination disappears from the reels to make room for new icons.
The maximum a player can win from this game is 20,000x times the stake. If that win is reached during Free Spins, the game immediately ends, the remaining bonus spins are forfeited, and the player returns to basic mode.
A Stream of Licensing Agreements
Big Time took the iGaming world by storm when it debuted its first Megaways titles in 2016, but it was not until the spring of 2018 when it started licensing the US-patented and trademarked mechanic to other content makers to really revolutionize slots development.
The Megaways franchise literally exploded and now includes more than 100 titles from the world’s biggest casino games creators.
Gauselmann Group’s iGaming studio Blueprint Gaming was the first to obtain a license for BTG’s engine. The partnership was announced in April 2018 and enabled Blueprint to design, develop, and distribute its own Megaways slots.
By the next year or so, the likes of Red Tiger, Storm Gaming, Stakelogic, and Scientific Games joined the ranks of gambling software providers who opted for the ground-breaking system. As part of its licensing agreement, Red Tiger, which in 2019 became part of NetEnt, released a Megaways-boosted version of its parent company’s legendary slot Gonzo’s Quest.
Microgaming, one more big industry player, sealed a licensing agreement with the mechanic’s creator in October 2020. The first title as part of that partnership – Shamrock Holmes – was crafted by All41 Studios, one of Microgaming’s exclusive developer partners – and was released in early 2021.
More companies will certainly follow suit as players have been responding quite enthusiastically to the engine. And this overwhelmingly positive reaction is not a surprise. After all, Megaways challenged the common perception that big symbols bring big wins. In addition, slots equipped with this mechanic deliver some of the biggest non-jackpot wins in the sector thanks to tens and even hundreds of thousands of winways.
