Slots Constantly Operating in the Negative?

[Shui]

Everything I've read suggests that slots are the most profitable things to put in your casino, but I'm not really turning any sort of profit in them. I installed a few different machines at different price points to capture gamblers of various confidence levels. They're all at 9% odds and are running the most popular games at the time... but it seems impossible to turn any sort of profit. Ignoring the purchase price, I basically have lost $5k per machine to coins and notes after 2 days, while only making 3-4K in profit from those same machines.

Is this normal? Do I just need to wait longer for them to profit, or is there something I'm doing wrong that's causing this coins and notes sink?

I know I can research better house odds... but it's pretty damn expensive for what's only as 3% maximum boost for the next available level. I spent most of my starter funds just setting up the casino, so if I'm losing money on everything, I dunno if I can afford to invest another 36K into raising it a small percentage, not knowing if it'll actually help noticeably.

[joyceh]

I am also losing money on slot machines and security can not seem to stop the stealing

[Shui]

Wait... is it from theft? Because if I go to Security and Crime, it says my all-time theft is $0 which implies no one stole from me? Unless that screen is garbage/inaccurate.

Does your game say you have theft or is it $0? Because my game is suggesting I have no theft, just negative money from slots.

[Inixus]

I get the most profit from my hotel rooms, nothing even comes close to that money making, second is the Pai gow poker table, in my game it makes at least 3 times what it pays out.

For slots i keep the jackpot chance under 3% and i make about double what it pays out.

[Shui]

I just started, so I don't really have the money to invest in hotel rooms yet, sadly. Trying to work my way there, but I gotta get the cheap stuff to turn profits first

Oh and all my slots were already under 3%. Jackpot chance is 2.41% for all of them.

[Inixus]

Originally posted by joyceh:

I am also losing money on slot machines and security can not seem to stop the stealing

Have you set up patrols?

[Inixus]

Originally posted by Koko:

I just started, so I don't really have the money to invest in hotel rooms yet, sadly. Trying to work my way there, but I gotta get the cheap stuff to turn profits first

Oh and all my slots were already under 3%. Jackpot chance is 2.41% for all of them.

On my first casino i started with 2 sides, a hotel side and a casino side, it dosnt cost that much to make economy rooms, start small.

I just cant make the casino work without a hotel, im not smart enough to understand how to tweek the gambling to get the perfect setup.

Thats y i was so glad sumeone made a beginners guide for the slots, but that info is outdated.

[Borrego6165]

Please upload your save with the bug report option in the game menu if you haven't already. Generally the feedback is that slots make too much money / game is too easy with them, so we would need to take a look.

[Shui]

Originally posted by Inixus:

Originally posted by Koko:

I just started, so I don't really have the money to invest in hotel rooms yet, sadly. Trying to work my way there, but I gotta get the cheap stuff to turn profits first

Oh and all my slots were already under 3%. Jackpot chance is 2.41% for all of them.

On my first casino i started with 2 sides, a hotel side and a casino side, it dosnt cost that much to make economy rooms, start small.

I just cant make the casino work without a hotel, im not smart enough to understand how to tweek the gambling to get the perfect setup.

Thats y i was so glad sumeone made a beginners guide for the slots, but that info is outdated.

I did my profile with only like $200k in starting funds, so I couldn't remotely afford to build a hotel xP

Originally posted by Borrego6165:

Please upload your save with the bug report option in the game menu if you haven't already. Generally the feedback is that slots make too much money / game is too easy with them, so we would need to take a look.

Will do. And to clarify, it's not that the slots don't make a profit as far as income vs. operation/licensing/installation fees... but there's this huge chunk draining out in coins and notes that negates everything.

For example, my most played machine looks like this:

Income: $7928
Purchase Price: ($3500)
Running costs: ($223)
Total Daily Fees: $172 (shouldn't this also have parenthesis since it's a deduction?)
Total Installation Fees: $43 (same as above)
($6239) worth of coins and notes

Lifetime Profit: ($2034)

[Borrego6165]

It looks correct yeah. Your "current" profit is $7928 - 6239 - 223 - 172 = $1294. That's actually pretty good for just $7928 income! The only reason it is less than that, is because the initial purchase price was $3500, which is subtracted at the end. So yes, you are making a profit, but you just haven't paid off the initial purchase cost yet. Hope that helps!

[Shui]

Originally posted by Borrego6165:

It looks correct yeah. Your "current" profit is $7928 - 6239 - 223 - 172 = $1294. That's actually pretty good for just $7928 income! The only reason it is less than that, is because the initial purchase price was $3500, which is subtracted at the end. So yes, you are making a profit, but you just haven't paid off the initial purchase cost yet. Hope that helps!

You say that, but then one would expect the lifetime profit to gradually improve as I keep playing... and yet 2 game days later and that machine's lifetime profit dropped by another $700 xP

I did fiddle with the settings on another machine and maybe found the ideal formula. I don't know if this will work at all on other slots yet (haven't tested) but I have a Game Jack that I changed to $2 slots and it exploded. It's the 2nd most played (just behind quarter slots) and easily has the most profit. It makes like 1K a day in profit just from the 1 machine in the early goings where I don't have more than 40 guests a day.

My other test slots are quarter Ring of Fortune (popular, but doesn't make much) and 2 machines with regular games at $1 and $5. I keep making sure the most popular 2 games are installed in those two. Those ones can't overcome the initial cost due to paying out too often, I guess? One have them has a negative historical house advantage (about -8%) despite the house advantage being set to 2.41%.

I'm doing a lot of different tester machines because I don't really understand if certain machines work better with certain price points or not... especially standalone ones like Ring and Blackjack that don't have a slots market to tell you how popular they are. There's no real way to discern whether they'll just always be played (and thus are maybe better to use than the regular games) or if there's some fluctuation that you just can't see. Some clarity on that would be nice.

[Borrego6165]

Why do you have the house advantage set to 2.41%? It goes up to 9% or 18% with research. We do recommend a variety so that guests don't get angry playing only high advantage slots, but that number is a very low advantage. The lower advantage, the more lucky you have to be to make a profit. It's not going to match up without *tens of thousands* of plays.

[Shui]

Originally posted by Borrego6165:

Why do you have the house advantage set to 2.41%? It goes up to 9% or 18% with research. We do recommend a variety so that guests don't get angry playing only high advantage slots, but that number is a very low advantage. The lower advantage, the more lucky you have to be to make a profit. It's not going to match up without *tens of thousands* of plays.

Sorry, looking at the wrong thing. House advantage is NOT 2.41%. Jackpot chance is. House advantage is 9%

At 9% advantage, I have some machines going as low as -31% historical advantage.

[Spill]

Noticed several times that guests sit down and dont pay anything at machines. As I have come to understand it they may play along time by being lucky on single and double win. But does not make sense that they dont make an initial payment. Slots are cash only right?

Wonder if they actually start playing when they do the sit down animation. Maybe makes several runs, and only if lost makes the inital payment? Or is it a bug?

[patriot6000]

To add to what the others were saying about other revenue options to get you going:

I have found the most profitable thing to be not hotel rooms, but the buffet. Your cheapest return on investment is conference centres. The two combine to form the best income stream strategy. Build a good number of conference rooms, again they are cheap, which generates one hundred percent passive income. I.e the income from the rooms has no overhead except your property taxes and the cost of the walls and tables. The key is that these drive traffic into your casino and fill your buffet every day. With a good number of conference rooms pumping your buffet full of customers, you will generate substantial amounts of income which cost much less to acquire than the cost of building and maintaining, cleaning staff, hotel rooms. Hotel rooms do generate a lot of income as well, but I have found the buffet to be number one. Make sure you have enough service counters, a large buffet zone with many seats and enough stoves/prep tables in your kitchen to service all of your business guests since they usually all stay for a meal after their meetings.

The person who mentioned Pai Gow as a top earner is correct, it generates a lot of income. For starting out in table games, I would suggest one or two Texas Hold Em tables since they are untouched by theft and you do not pay out money on them since all of the winnings come from the player's buy in. This means your only expense is the staff member and some cards. Low overhead with a good income stream is where you want to start.

In my opinion, slots are not the best revenue option and are labour intensive. By all means you should have some, a few, but, to me, they are unimportant.

Strictly my two cents, hope that helps some - Patriot

[Shui]

Slots seem to be an easy way to drive gamblers into the casino, though. For $70k, I can throw down 20 slot machines which will give me roughly 100 customers a day with 0 advertising. For that same amount, I could do about 5 tables, the cashier cage, and a few slot machines... but I get a quarter of the gamblers coming in this way.

I feel like table games are a bad thing to start off with because of their expense. You're going to take a while to actually turn a decent profit and will have trouble developing your casino further. Slots make the initial purchase price back in a few days generally (I tend to average 1K a day per machine) so you can build your funds back up again to expand into things like tables later once you have a solid customer base.

At least that's how it seems for me. The conference room idea sounds like a great one though given how little you need to invest in setting one up.

EDIT: I also just tried the buffet but it did NOT work out. I ended up getting charged 3K for restocking soda/raw ingredients but only made 2K in income as not many people really bothered with the buffet. I'm pulling like 300 guest a day so I made about 50 seats in my buffet area with plenty capacity to prepare food... but it remained mostly empty. You might have 2-5 people at a given time actually inside.

Not sure if I just completely misunderstood how to use this, but it was a huge cash sink that isn't actually seeing any sort of return. I was doing much better just letting the business people gamble on my slots xD I get like 200 gamblers and 100 business people a day and that seems to get me about $20k in profit daily