Is Mega Vault Millionaire a Low or High Variance slot game?

There is no doubt that Mega Vault Millionaire has taken the online slot world by storm since its release and its popularity is only continuing to grow in the weeks since then.

Having already paid out a number of Major Jackpot winners in October, it looks likely that it won't be too long before the game crowns its first instant millionaire jackpot winner when someone wins the Mega Jackpot prize.

But for all the excitement of these huge progressive jackpot prizes, the fact of the matter is that for the majority of players on Mega Vault Millionaire, you are going to be spending the vast majority of your time playing the base game and as such, the variance of that base game is key in determining what kind of experience you will have when playing the slot.

What is Variance or Volatility?

The variance of a slot, sometimes also called the volatility of the game, is generally described as one of three things, low, medium or high, but what does that actually mean?

Well quite simply, the variance or volatility of a slot is determined by how it tends to pay out its players. If your slot game has lots of wins regularly, but they all tend to be of smaller amounts, then this is termed a lower variance slot. A higher variance slot is a game that doesn't have as many wins and can have a large number of non-winning spins in succession, but the wins it does have tend to be of a higher value.

Mid or medium variance slots are games that are somewhere between the two, offering a mix of wins and perhaps a more irregular frequency of those wins. You can also get slots that sit between the medium level and the two extremes, so you have low to medium variance slots too as well as medium to higher variance games.

Some people think that the Return to Player (RTP) percentage of a slot determines the volatility of a game, but that is not the case. The RTP percentage simply indicates how much of the money taken in over the lifetime of the slot, it will be expected to pay back to players as winnings. So, if a slot has an RTP of 95%, that means over its lifetime, 95% of the money it takes in, would be expected to be paid back out.

This is different to variance which describes how that 95% is paid out. Low variance would see the 95% paid to customers in smaller value, regular wins. High variance would see it paid out in fewer wins but of larger amounts.

It is good to know the distinction between variance and RTP and how the two are linked as it gives you a more accurate appreciation of how your game will work. It is entirely possible to have a game with a RTP percentage of 95% that is a highly volatile slot, while another game with the same RTP could be a very low volatility game.

What is the Variance of Mega Vault Millionaire?

Now that we understand what variance and RTP means, the question we now have to ask is what is the variance of the Mega Vault Millionaire slot? The first thing to note is that Microgaming does like to keep the RTP rating of its slot under wraps, so we don't have an accurate figure for this. But as we have discovered, this doesn't matter when determining how volatile a slot is.

The general rule of thumb with progressive jackpot slot games, generally due to the fact that they have a progressive fund to contribute to from every wager on every spin, is that these games tend to be higher volatility than most others.

Certainly, a quick straw poll of other comparable progressive jackpot slots tends to reveal that these games are all higher variance and they have a generally lower RTP than other games.

There's nothing sinister about this when you think about it, the progressive jackpot prizes have to be generated from somewhere and that comes from each stake you wager on every spin. With a proportion of that going into the progressive prize fund, there isn't as much of your stake to pay out to winning players, hence the RTP is always going to be lower on these slots.

The positive side of that though is that games like Mega Vault Millionaire do offer a chance at landing life-changing prizes. In this case, a shot at two massive prizes, the Major jackpot which runs into tens of thousands and the huge Mega Jackpot prize of at least 1 million and often considerably more.

So is Mega Vault Millionaire a high variance slot by default due to it being a progressive game?

It's supposed to be a higher volatility game, but in playing it myself extensively, I am not so sure that it is quite as volatile as other slots part of the Mega Moolah network.

Admittedly, even though I have played the game a lot, it is still a very small sample size and it is hard to accurately gauge a slot over such a small number of spins. Volatility tends to be worked out over millions, rather than a few hundred spins.

Even so, I won regularly on the Mega Vault Millionaire game, although what was notable was that the majority of wins were for smaller amounts and often did not amount to as much as I had spent on the original bet, so while it was technically a win, I was still losing a little money on the bet.

However, I also triggered the Free Spins bonus a few times in my play, which was nice as a shot at the new Jackpot Bonus Game has eluded me so far, and when I triggered Free Spins, the amount I won was greatly increased, as you would expect for a bonus feature in a slot game.

While I would not class Mega Vault Millionaire as a low variance slot, or even a mid-variance game, I don't think it plays like a true high variance slot, with very few wins, but higher value wins when landed. I think it is a mid-to-high variance game, with more wins in the base game, albeit of lesser value, and the occasional bigger win coming in Free Spins (or rarely, if you can hit a decent combination across the reels in the base game, usually with Wilds involved).

However, I would also add a caveat here and say that I could change that view in the future as I play the game more. Experiences from session to session on slot games can differ, especially on progressive jackpot games. I remember one session on the original Mega Moolah, where I landed the Jackpot Bonus wheel twice in the space of around 20 spins (winning the Mini and Minor Jackpots) and other times, I have gone hundreds and hundreds of spins without a sniff of the jackpot prize.

So for now, I've pegged Mega Vault Millionaire as a mid-to-high volatility slot, but that may change in the future once I've played it a little more. Do your experiences on the slot corroborate that?

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