Bonus buy features explained

What a feature buy is

A bonus buy, also called a feature buy or buy-in, is an option to pay a fixed multiple of the stake to enter a game's bonus round immediately, instead of waiting for it to trigger during ordinary play.

The price is stated as a multiple. Pragmatic Play's page for Gates of Olympus 1000 says the free spins bonus round can also be triggered with a bonus buy in the base game for 100x the player's bet¹. At a £0.20 stake that is £20; at a £2 stake it is £200.

Hacksaw Gaming's Wanted Dead or a Wild is another title offering a route into its bonus rounds, published alongside four return to player versions of 96.38%, 94.55%, 92.33% and 88.42% and a maximum win of 12,500x⁴.

What buying does to the arithmetic

Three things change at once, and only the first is obvious.

The amount staked per decision. This is plain multiplication. One press of a 100x buy commits the equivalent of 100 base spins¹. A session that would have taken an hour at £0.20 a spin is compressed into a single click.

The composition of the outcome. Ordinary play mixes base-game results with occasional feature entries. A purchased round removes the base game entirely, so the entire outcome is drawn from the feature's distribution. The result is a narrower set of possibilities with a much larger spread around the stake, which is the definition of higher volatility rather than of better or worse value; what volatility means sets out what that spread means in practice.

The applicable return to player. This is the part readers most often get wrong. The return to player of a purchased feature is a property of the game's design and is not necessarily identical to the headline figure for base play. Where a provider publishes a separate figure for the buy, that figure is the one that applies to the purchase; where it does not, the number is simply not public. Any page that states a general rule about buy-in returns being systematically higher or lower than base play is asserting something the providers do not publish.

In Great Britain, whatever the design, the rules and the information that help a customer judge the likelihood of winning must be easily available before the customer commits to gamble⁵.

Where feature buys are restricted

Availability is a market-by-market question, and the picture is more nuanced than "banned" or "allowed".

Great Britain. On 17 January 2020 the Gambling Commission published a warning about feature buy-in facilities on slots-style games, noting that they allowed players to stake significant amounts to access the bonus feature without playing the initial stages of the game, and citing one example that charged more than £3,000 to enter the bonus feature². The Commission said all six operators it had contacted about the feature buy-in element had removed it from their sites, and framed the intervention against its existing technical standards rather than as a new prohibition². Those standards include the requirement that gambling products must not actively encourage customers to chase their losses, increase their stake or increase the amount they have decided to gamble⁶.

Germany. The Interstate Treaty on Gambling 2021 does not contain a provision naming feature purchases. What it does contain is a limit that leaves no room for them: the stake may not exceed one euro per game, and a game must last on average at least five seconds³. A purchase priced at 100 times the stake cannot coexist with a one-euro cap on the stake itself.

Elsewhere. Providers commonly ship the same title with the buy option enabled in some markets and disabled in others, which is why a game can offer the option on one site and not on another. The authoritative statement is the game's own rules panel in the jurisdiction you are in, not a general article.

Related design rules worth knowing

Feature buys sit inside a wider set of product design rules in Great Britain that shape how quickly money can be staked and how outcomes are presented.

The technical standards set a minimum of 2.5 seconds from the start of a game to the next game cycle for casino games and a minimum of 5 seconds for slots, prohibit functionality that facilitates playing multiple games at the same time, and prohibit celebrating a return that is less than or equal to the total stake gambled⁶. The same standards bar the option to cancel a withdrawal request⁶.

Read together, these rules point in one direction: slowing the rate at which decisions and money are committed. A feature buy runs the other way, which is why it attracts regulatory attention.

Practical points before deciding

• Read the price as money, not as a multiple. 100x sounds abstract; the same figure in pounds does not¹.
• Check whether a separate return to player is published for the buy. If one exists it will be in the rules panel; if not, the figure is unknown.
• Check which return to player version the operator is running. Where providers publish several, the operator selects one⁴.
• Treat it as a spending decision. working out the cost per hour covers setting a figure before play rather than during it, and account limits explained covers the account tools that enforce it.
• Remember the house edge does not change because the route changed. Our explanation of that arithmetic is at the casino advantage by game.

Titles in our database that carry a buy option are listed at , recorded from the provider's own published specification.