Hacksaw Gaming publishes four return to player figures for Wanted Dead or a Wild on its own website: 96.38%, 94.55%, 92.33% and 88.42%. Same artwork, same features, same name in the lobby. Four different games as far as your balance is concerned.
The casino picks which one it runs. You are not told which, unless you look, and the review site you checked before playing almost certainly quoted the highest one.
This is not a scandal being hidden. The studios publish the RTP figures openly, regulators permit the practice, and there is a straightforward commercial reason it exists that has more to do with tax law than with casinos being greedy. But it does mean the single most useful habit in online slots is checking a number that takes five seconds to find and that almost nobody looks at.
The short answer: Studios certify the same slot at several RTP settings and sell them as separate builds. Casinos choose one. The gap between the best and worst build of a single game can exceed eight percentage points, which dwarfs the difference between one slot and another. The live figure is in the game information panel, and it is the only one that applies to you.
How Many Versions Are There?
Usually three or four, and the studios list them publicly. These are taken from the developers’ own game pages.
| Game | Studio | Published RTP settings | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wanted Dead or a Wild | Hacksaw | 96.38% / 94.55% / 92.33% / 88.42% | 7.96 |
| Chaos Crew 2 | Hacksaw | 96.27% / 94.22% / 92.41% / 88.28% | 7.99 |
| Le Bandit | Hacksaw | 96.34% / 94.23% / 92.17% / 88.36% | 7.98 |
| Jammin’ Jars | Push Gaming | 96.83% / 94.25% | 2.58 |
| Fat Banker | Push Gaming | 96.43% / 94.45% | 1.98 |
An eight point spread is not a rounding difference. At 96.38% the house expects to keep 3.62% of everything you bet. At 88.42% it expects to keep 11.58%. Playing the low build costs you more than three times as much per unit wagered, in a game that looks identical.
Push Gaming adds a note on its own game pages that is worth repeating verbatim: “RTP’s may vary per casino. The RTP of the game can be found in the user panel and on the game loading screen.” The studios are not hiding this.
Not every developer publishes a variant list, and that absence proves nothing either way. Nolimit City shows a single figure per game on its site, and so do Pragmatic Play and most of the larger studios. It means you cannot check from the studio’s page, not that only one build exists.
Why Studios Build Lower Versions
The honest answer is tax, and one studio has made it visible.
Relax Gaming publishes spec tables on its own product pages with a row labelled German RTP: 90.00% and another labelled Alternative RTP: 94.00%, with a separate game ID for each configuration. A studio is openly naming one build after the market it was made for.
Here is why that build exists. Germany taxes online slots at 5.3% of all player expenditure, meaning turnover rather than profit. At a 96% RTP the operator’s gross margin is 4% of turnover. The tax is 5.3% of the same turnover. The product loses money before a single other cost is counted. A 90% build produces a 10% margin against a 5.3% tax, which is a business. Ninety-six per cent is not available in Germany at any price, because the tax structure removes it.
The same pressure is now arriving in Britain. Remote Gaming Duty rises from 21% to 40% on 1 April 2026, and industry coverage through 2026 has reported operators moving titles to lower configurations in response. There is no reliable public dataset on how widespread that is, and anyone quoting a percentage of games affected is guessing, but the direction is not in dispute and the arithmetic behind it is simple.
What a four point cut really means: Moving a game from 96% to 92% sounds like a 4% change. It is not. The house edge goes from 4% to 8%, so the cost of playing has doubled. As one studio executive put it, you have not cut the return by four per cent, you have doubled the price. The same logic makes 88% roughly three times more expensive than 96%.
Is It Legal?
Yes, everywhere we could check. No regulator we found prohibits supplying a game at several certified settings, and none requires an operator to announce which one it has chosen beyond the general duty to publish the return.
Minimum floors exist in a few places and they are lower than most players assume. Malta sets a minimum of 85%, reduced from 92% in 2021. Affiliate sites still routinely quote the old 92% figure, which is wrong. Under the current Maltese floor, Hacksaw’s 88.42% build is perfectly legal, and it would not have been before that change.
Great Britain sets no minimum RTP at all. The Gambling Commission has confirmed this directly in response to a freedom of information request. What it does require, under RTS 3C, is that the return to player percentage or the probability of winning events is available to the customer before they commit to gamble. Crucially, the Commission defines theoretical RTP as the designed return of the game which “will also be the advertised RTP”, so a British operator is required to advertise the figure actually running rather than the studio’s headline.
Elsewhere the picture is thinner than published claims suggest. Sweden requires that information on the probability of winning is easily available and that game rules can be read without placing a bet. Spain requires disclosure of both the theoretical return and the actual realised payout. We could not find a primary source for the frequently quoted Italian minimum, and Denmark’s position we could not establish at all, so we are not repeating figures for either.
How to Check the Real RTP Before You Spin
Five seconds, and it is the same in most games.
- Open the game. The figure often appears on the loading screen, which is the easiest place to catch it.
- Open the information panel. Usually the “i” icon, a menu button, or the paytable. Scroll to the bottom of the rules, where the return is stated.
- Read the number, not the range. If several figures appear, check whether they are buy modes, which is common on games with a feature purchase, or separate configurations.
- Compare it with the studio’s page. If the studio publishes a higher figure than the one in front of you, the casino is running a lowered build.
Two things to know about demo play. Under a Maltese licence the demo must run the same RTP as the real money game, which makes demo mode a legitimate way to check. That guarantee does not automatically apply elsewhere, so treat a demo figure as indicative rather than binding outside that licence.
And never take the number from a review page, including this site’s. A review can only report what a studio published or what one casino was running on one day. The panel in front of you is the only figure that governs your money.
How Much Difference Does It Actually Make?
Take a €3,000 turnover, which is what a 30x wagering requirement on a €100 bonus asks for.
At 96.38% the house expects to keep about €109 of that. At 92.33%, about €230. At 88.42%, about €347. Same game, same bonus, same number of spins, and the expected cost of clearing the offer more than triples between the best and worst build.
That is why this matters more than choosing between slots. The difference between two well-regarded 96% games is a fraction of a percentage point. The difference between two casinos running the same game can be eight.
It also interacts with everything else. A lowered build makes a marginal bonus unprofitable, makes a high volatility game harder to survive long enough to reach its feature, lowers the hit frequency you experience, and quietly worsens every calculation a careful player makes.
It is also the most legitimate grievance players have about online slots, and the one worth separating from the rest. The random number generator is not rigged and the game is not adjusted mid-session, which is the whole of the question of whether slots are rigged. The build the casino chose, however, is a real and material difference that you are not told about unless you look.
Is the Industry Split on This?
Publicly, yes, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.
RubyPlay has said it does not develop games for markets below 94%, describing a cliff edge where returns under 94% show statistically significant drops in engagement and anything below 90% performs catastrophically. The UK operator Hollywoodbets has stated it is not raising margins by lowering RTP to offset the tax increase, and built a leaderboard surfacing its highest-return games instead.
Others argue the margin is recycled into promotions, so players get it back through bonuses rather than through the paytable. Judge that argument by the terms on those bonuses rather than their headline size, which is what bonus basics is for.
No regulator we found has publicly criticised the practice, and we could not establish whether any enforcement action has ever been taken over it.
What This Means in Practice
Check the panel before your first spin, every time, at every new casino. If the figure is materially below what the studio publishes, the same game is better value somewhere else, and moving costs you nothing.
It applies to every format equally. A Megaways title, a cluster pays game and a conventional twenty-line slot are all supplied in multiple builds, and the mechanic on the front makes no difference to which one you are playing. Casinos selected for payout percentage are listed at best payout casinos.
Weight this above almost every other factor when comparing operators. A casino running full-configuration games is worth more to you than a larger welcome offer at a casino running lowered ones, because the RTP applies to everything you ever bet there while the bonus applies once.
And treat a missing or hard-to-find RTP figure as information in itself. Operators running the best builds have every reason to make the number easy to find. Operators that run the higher configurations tend to say so, and the casinos grouped by software provider are the fastest way to see whose builds you would be reading in the information panel.
Frequently Asked Questions
They cannot alter it mid-session or per player. What they choose is which certified build of the game to deploy, from the settings the studio supplies. That choice is made at the casino level for the title, so the figure is fixed for everyone playing it there until the operator switches build.
Because studios certify one game at several RTP settings and sell them as separate builds with separate game IDs, and each casino picks one. Hacksaw Gaming publishes four settings for its titles, spanning roughly eight percentage points from best to worst.
Open the game’s information panel, usually the “i” icon, a menu button or the paytable, and scroll to the rules. The figure is often shown on the loading screen too. That number is the one running at your casino, and it overrides anything a review site says.
Yes, in every market we could check. No regulator prohibits supplying multiple certified builds. Some set a floor: Malta’s minimum is 85%, lowered from 92% in 2021. Great Britain has no minimum at all, though British operators must make the running figure available before you commit to gamble.
It depends entirely on the licence. Malta requires at least 85%. Great Britain sets no minimum, which the Gambling Commission has confirmed directly. Many other markets have no published floor either, so the practical minimum is whatever the studio certifies and the operator selects.
Usually because a market’s tax structure makes a higher return unviable. Germany taxes online slots at 5.3% of everything staked rather than of profit, so at 96% RTP the operator’s 4% margin is smaller than the tax. Relax Gaming publishes a build labelled “German RTP: 90.00%” for exactly this reason.
More than the percentage suggests. Going from 96% to 92% doubles the house edge from 4% to 8%, so the cost of playing doubles. Over the €3,000 turnover of a typical wagering requirement, the expected cost rises from roughly €109 at 96.38% to about €347 at 88.42%.
Under a Maltese licence it must, so demo play is a legitimate check there. That guarantee is not universal, so outside the MGA treat the demo figure as indicative and confirm it in the real money game’s panel.
Review sites quote whatever the studio published or whatever one casino was running when the review was written. Neither is binding on the casino you are at. The panel in the live game is the only figure that applies to your money.
Not all publish variant lists, and a studio showing a single figure on its website does not prove it supplies only one build. Hacksaw, Push Gaming and Relax Gaming publish theirs. Others do not, which means you have to check the game panel rather than the studio page.
Germany is the clearest documented case because of its turnover tax, and Relax Gaming labels a build for that market explicitly. Beyond that, no credible public dataset exists on how common lowered builds are, so anyone quoting a share of games affected is estimating rather than reporting.
It is one of the strongest reasons to prefer one casino over another, because the return applies to everything you ever wager there while a welcome bonus applies once. If a game is running materially below the studio’s published figure, the identical game elsewhere is better value and switching costs nothing.
