Wheel of Wishes released but Mega Moolah is still the top jackpot slot!

There is no doubt that Microgaming's latest progressive jackpot behemoth, complete with its 2 million seeded top progressive prize, the Wowpot, has already got tongues wagging and slot players excited to try its somewhat unusual and different game play.

While under limited release, and thanks to a number of freely available demo modes of the game, there has been some talk as to whether the release of the Wheel of Wishes slot will zoom past other big Microgaming progressive jackpots such as the legendary Mega Moolah slot.

A quick comparison

So, what are people basing this assumption on that Mega Moolah has been usurped as Microgaming's go-to progressive jackpot slot? Well, essentially it is this simple comparison of progressive jackpot seed amounts:

• Mini Jackpot: Mega Moolah seed 10.00 - WoW Seed - 10.00
• Minor Jackpot: Mega Moolah seed 100.00 - WoW Seed - 100.00
• Major Jackpot: Mega Moolah seed 10,000 - WoW Seed - 50,000
• Mega Jackpot / Wowpot Jackpot: Mega Moolah seed 1,000,000 - WoW Seed - 2,000,000

You cannot really argue with the facts here. While both progressive have the same seed amount for the two (and much more frequently awarded jackpot prizes) the Mini and Minor jackpots, the Wheel of Wishes Major jackpot is seeded five times higher than the Mega Moolah equivalent, while the biggest jackpot prize, the Mega Jackpot on Mega Moolah and the Wowpot on Wheel of Wishes sees Mega Moolah's seed amount of a million, doubled to two million on Wheel of Wishes.

However, the assumption is that because the Major and Wowpot Jackpots on Wheel of Wishes are seeded higher initially, that this will mean that the jackpot prizes on offer on the slot will outrun those on Mega Moolah. But is that really going to be the case?

Personally, I am not so sure and there are a number of reasons why that despite a much higher initial seed amount, I still feel that the Wheel of Wishes slot may struggle, at least initially, to match some of the prizes you can land on the Mega Moolah progressive.

To understand why, you first need to understand the key factors that are evident on a progressive jackpot slot that has such large prizes available to be won.

Here's why Mega Moolah rocks...

1. Building up a following

The first thing to note here is that even with a general release today and a limited release beforehand, it is still going to take a good deal of time for the Wheel of Wishes slot to build up a following of players.

In one respect, Wheel of Wishes has it much easier than Mega Moolah did when it was released many years ago. Back then Microgaming had never released a big money progressive on this scale and so it had to build up the player base for Mega Moolah from literally nothing. Wheel of Wishes has the benefit of being able to appeal to all those thousands upon thousands of players that play Mega Moolah.

Even so, with no history available for the Wheel of Wishes slot in terms of the top two jackpots being won (neither was triggered during the limited release of the slot), it is fair to say that slot players are going to be a little guarded with this slot initially. How often are the two big jackpots going to pay out?

This is an important thing to consider. As would you rather play a progressive jackpot slot that pays out 12 or 13 winners in a year worth a million or more (as Mega Moolah did in 2019 and 2017), or one that hasn't paid out any as yet, but which is seeded at double the amount? Most experienced progressive slot players would prefer to play the slot with the track record of at least making some of its players millionaires.

Of course, over the coming months and years, the Wheel of Wishes slot will start to get its own history and then players will be able to far better judge whether it is a game that they will prefer to spend their money on.

It is not easy to estimate when the first Wheel of Wishes slot big jackpot prize will be won. It could be triggered today, on its first day of general release, or it could be days, weeks or even months away. It may not be triggered for a year or more. That is the nature of progressives and it is also why companies like Microgaming keep the actual odds of triggering the biggest prizes on their game something of a closely guarded secret. BTW you can follow all the Wheel of Wishes stats here.

All these factors will combine into how much appeal Wheel of Wishes will have upon its release. Sure, the game has received plenty of excited hype over the last couple of months, there's no doubting that it is a fabulous game, but it still has a little way to go to drum up the kind of support that Mega Moolah now enjoys. That takes time, experience and history and you can only get that by being in existence and appealing to players for a long time.

1. Feeder games

At the moment, the Wheel of Wishes slot has only this game paying into its progressive jackpot prize pool. However, Microgaming have announced that later this year, they are going to release at least one other game that will also pay into the same Wowpot progressive jackpot prize pool. For the time being though, it is solely Wheel of Wishes generating the cash to add to its progressive prizes.

For many years, the original Mega Moolah was in a similar position, but then Microgaming also added Mega Moolah versions of popular slots Isis, Summertime and 5-Reel Drive. For many years, these were the go-to games to play for the Mega Moolah jackpot prize, but that all changed last year.

In late 2019, Microgaming released the Mega Vault Millionaire slot into Casino Rewards Network casinos. This slot also paid into the Mega Moolah jackpot, and thus offered players on it a chance to win the prize. However, the game was only available at Casino Rewards Network sites, which meant that although this was an expansive network, it could not be played by everybody.

However, in early 2020, Microgaming also released their new Atlantean Treasures slot game. This was also linked to the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot fund and this new game also offered a very different type of game to other Mega Moolah progressives.

Atlantean Treasures is a 10 pay line, win both ways game that features Expanding Wilds that trigger additional Free Respins, This is a very popular structure for slot games, and has been the basis for some of the most popular slots of modern times. Microgaming undoubtedly pulled off a stroke of genius by combining this particular type of slot, which is already hugely popular with players in a standard format, and then combining that with the excitement of a chance at landing the Mega Moolah jackpot prize.

The upshot of these recent releases has been that the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot prize fund is growing at a faster rate than ever before, on average over the last few weeks at around 100,000 or more per day, and the evidence is suggesting that this amount is growing as the jackpot continues to grow (at the present moment, the jackpot prize pool on Mega Moolah is at 7.3 million, compared to 2.1 millon for Wheel of Wishes).

So at the moment, the Wheel of Wishes slot has only its customers adding to its prize pool, whereas the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot has players of the original Mega Moolah, the three other Mega Moolah games and the two brand new games, one of which has proven to be a smash hit success on its release, all adding to its jackpot prize pool.

When you consider those revenue streams, even a prize pool that is seeded at 2 million compared to 1 million would quickly be overtaken. This to me suggests that at least for the time being, the Mega Moolah slot is the one that is most likely to see the highest jackpot prizes available.

The only way this may not occur is if the Wheel of Wishes top jackpot is not won for a considerable amount of time and grows over a substantial period of time. However, the down side of that is if the jackpot is not won for a while, will players want to play the game if they can see that the Mega Moolah jackpot has been and is being won?

• Do seeding amounts matter?

This may seem like an odd question. If you are going to play two similar slots for a similar prize and one offers you a cash prize of a million, the other 2 million, then you are more likely to opt for the two million one. However, the truth of the matter is that the seed amounts for each slot only come into play on very rare occasions.

This is because often when a jackpot prize is won, the jackpot is seldom required to be set back to the initial seed amount as there is often enough left in the prize pool for it to continue.

How does that work? Well, it is rather simple. The Mega Moolah and Wheel of Wishes slots both have the British Pound as their base currency. However, as the game can be played all over the world, the slot can also be played in other currencies, such as the Canadian Dollar, US Dollar, Euro or New Zealand Dollar to name but a few.

Rather than have to complicate things a great deal by calculating the spin cost for players in US Dollars or Euros compared to British Pounds, and then charging this amount (which would change each day due to the exchange rate) Microgaming use a simpler system. Players playing in US Dollars for example, pay the same amount (say 0.25 per spin) in US Dollars as British Pound players play, but if they win the jackpot prize (or indeed any prize) they are paid out in US Dollars. The same goes for any other currency in the world you can play Mega Moolah or Wheel of Wishes in.

So, if a player lands a big progressive jackpot win in US Dollars of say $10,000,000 on Mega Moolah, if the balance is £10,000,000, then $10,000,000 in British Pounds equates to around £7.73 million.

Therefore, if this player is paid out in full, this would mean that there would still be around £2.27 million left in the progressive jackpot prize fund. As such, this means that the seed amount is not necessary.

The only time a seed amount is relevant is if a player lands the Wheel of Wishes or Mega Moolah top jackpot prize pool using British Pound as their currency and in truth, over the past few years, there have not been too many times that this has happened. There have been six British Pound Winners of the Mega Moolah jackpot prize out of the 36 winners of a top jackpot prize since January 1st 2016.

While there is no doubt that the Wheel of Wishes slot is a fabulous addition to the Microgaming stable, and it will certainly appeal to players given how the slot offers a different type of progressive experience to other games, it is most definitely not a game that has been designed to usurp Mega Moolah, rather than to sit alongside it and offer an alternative.

Microgaming know that despite its age, Mega Moolah remains the first choice of a huge number of progressive jackpot fans and no new game is likely to change that soon. The company's commitment to the slot, with two new releases in the last year alone, has never been clearer.

Mega Moolah is still very much the top dog in the progressive jackpot industry for the time being and I don't think that is likely to change any time soon. The Mega Moolah jackpot is 7.6 million at the time of writing.

Related reading: Wheel of Wishes vs Mega Moolah vs Mega Vault Millionaire: Comparison.