What a release announcement is made of
Most studios announce new games in a similar format: a catchy headline, a short story about the theme, a technical table, a feature description, and often a quote from someone at the company. The table and the feature list are the useful part; the rest sets the mood.
Endorphina, for instance, announced Bazaar Monkey under the headline ‘Monkey Around the Market!’. The headline says nothing about the game, but the accompanying sheet does: 5x3 grid, 20 fixed lines, 96.08% RTP, high volatility, 7,500x maximum win. If you are short on time, start with the sheet and read the full text only if the features interest you.
The same goes for quotes. What a studio head says about their own game is opinion, not data. We do not quote it as fact either.
Early access and official release
Some studios give two dates. For Thor's Rage 2, Red Tiger set early access for 17 September 2026 and the official release for 24 September 2026. Early access means the game is already live for a narrower group, while other casinos get it from the official date. That is why our Thor's Rage 2 story leads with the official date.
Note also that studios write dates differently. Red Tiger uses day-month-year (24-09-2026), BGaming an English month name (Oct 05, 2026 for Witchcraft Riches), and Slotmill an ordinal (29th September 2026 for Dead Man's Crew). In our stories we normalise them to one format, so Red Tiger’s 24-09-2026 becomes 24 September 2026, and BGaming’s Oct 05 becomes 5 October 2026.
The third date is yours: when the game appears in the casino lobby. It does not necessarily match the official day. All six titles from our game news were visible in Dukat.bet’s lobby on 11 October 2026; we mark that date separately.
One game, several return-to-player values
RTP is the long-term share of stakes a game returns in theory. In the short run it tells you nothing about your next spins. What matters in a release is how many values the studio gives.
For Dead Man's Crew, Slotmill gives two: 96.07% and 94.09%. The casino decides which to switch on, so the release does not tell you which one you are playing. That is why our Dead Man's Crew story lists this in its ‘What we don’t know’ section.
BGaming’s pages show one value each: 96.68% for Witchcraft Riches, 97.00% for Johnny vs Chicken. That does not rule out the studio shipping other versions. The reliable reference is always the in-game info panel, because it describes the version actually running.
Live tables are a separate case. According to Pragmatic Play, the RTP of Privé Lounge Blackjack rises to 99.51% under the new rules. That is the studio’s own figure assuming optimal play, not what an average evening delivers.
High, very high, or just a number
Volatility describes how wins are spread: rarer and bigger, or more frequent and smaller. The problem is that there is no common scale; every studio uses its own categories.
| Game | Studio | What the studio says |
|---|---|---|
| Bazaar Monkey | Endorphina | high |
| Minotaur ReBurn | Endorphina | high |
| Dead Man's Crew | Slotmill | very high |
| Witchcraft Riches | BGaming | high |
| Johnny vs Chicken | BGaming | medium-high |
| Thor's Rage 2 | Red Tiger | numeric index only |
Endorphina’s ‘high’ does not necessarily match BGaming’s ‘high’. Within one studio the rating works for comparison; across studios it is only a rough signal.
For Thor's Rage 2, Red Tiger gives no verbal rating, just a number. Next to it, it lists a 27.63% hit frequency, which shows the share of spins that produce some win. That is not volatility and should not be read as such. We do not translate the numeric index into a word either, because we do not know where Red Tiger draws the lines on its scale.
Maximum win as an upper limit
Max win is a cap, expressed as a multiple of the stake, above which a single round cannot pay. The highest among our stories is the 20,000x cap of Thor's Rage 2, followed by 10,000x for Dead Man's Crew, 7,500x for Bazaar Monkey, 5,000x for Witchcraft Riches and Johnny vs Chicken, and 4,500x for Minotaur ReBurn. On its pages BGaming also gives a cap in euros, which applies at the highest stake.
Illustrative example (not Dukat.bet parameters): Bazaar Monkey, 0.10 EUR spin. The 7,500x cap equals 750 EUR here. That is the game’s theoretical top, not an expected value, and most sessions stay very far from it.
Do not confuse max win with feature multipliers. Witchcraft Riches potions give multipliers from x2 to x500, Thor's Rage 2 multipliers range from x2 to x1,000, and the Johnny vs Chicken duel works in the x2–x500 range. These are values inside a single feature; the cap still closes the payout of the whole round.
Bonus buy: price as a stake multiple
Many new slots let you buy the bonus round. The studio states the price as a multiple of the stake. Johnny vs Chicken has three buy levels, priced at 75x, 150x and 300x according to BGaming. Thor's Rage 2 offers six buy options, and Witchcraft Riches also has a Buy Bonus feature.
If you play with bonus money, point 2.7 of Dukat.bet’s bonus rules comes in. Under it, the maximum bet during wagering is generally 5 EUR, and an in-game bonus buy counts towards it. As a calculation: 5 / 75 ≈ 0.066 EUR, 5 / 150 ≈ 0.033 EUR, 5 / 300 ≈ 0.016 EUR. That is the highest possible base stake if the buy price may not exceed 5 EUR. Our Johnny vs Chicken story walks through what this means in practice.
The release does not say whether the buy is available at a given casino at all. You need to check that in the game.
What a release leaves unanswered
A studio announcement is about the game, not the casino. It does not tell you which RTP version runs in a given lobby, or whether the casino tags the new game. With live games, the applicable multiplier cap is often left open too. According to Ezugi, the Arcade Roulette multiplier stops at 500x on network tables and at 1,000x on certain dedicated tables, and from outside you cannot tell which table is which.
You can only fill these gaps in the lobby, in the game’s own info panel. For the order in which to go through things there before your first spin, see our seven-point checklist.