Payout DNA: A Map of How Every Stake Engine Slot Actually Pays

Published 2026-06-29 · Tags: product, slots, data

RTP is the average, volatility is the spread, neither is the shape. Payout DNA draws every mode's real outcome table as a strand you can compare at a glance.

New page: Payout DNA. It's the strangest thing we've built and I think it might be the most useful.

The problem it solves

RTP tells you the average. Volatility tells you, roughly, how spread out the results are. Neither tells you the shape. Two slots can both be 96% RTP, both be "high volatility", and feel nothing alike: one pays a steady drip of 2x–5x with a rare 1,000x, the other pays nothing for forty spins and then dumps a 50x.

Stake Engine games publish their complete outcome tables, which means we don't have to guess at the shape. We can draw it.

What you're looking at

Payout DNA takes every mode of every Stake Engine slot and plots its payout distribution as a strand. Each strand is built from the real outcome table: where the mass sits, how long the tail is, how much of the RTP comes from the top 1% of outcomes versus the bottom 90%.

Put two strands side by side and you can see, in one glance, that Game A gets a third of its RTP from outcomes above 100x while Game B gets almost none. That's the difference between "I can grind this" and "I'm buying a lottery ticket", and no single number captures it.

The arms of the strand are uncapped, so a mode with a 100,000x top outcome actually looks different from one capped at 5,000x, rather than both being squished into the same bucket.

Studios and galaxies

Zoom out and the strands cluster. Studios have fingerprints. Some build every game with the same payout philosophy and their strands line up like siblings. Others are all over the place. The studio view groups a provider's games together so you can see that at a glance, and the galaxy view puts every provider on the same map.

This started as a visualization experiment and turned into the fastest way we have to answer "what else plays like this". If you like a specific slot's feel, find its strand and look at its neighbors.

Buy modes

Bonus buys get their own strands, scaled by the buy cost, so a 100x buy is shown per 100x spent rather than per base bet. That's the only way the comparison is honest; otherwise every buy mode looks absurdly generous next to its base game.

Searching

There's a search box, it's instant, and it matches on game name, studio, or mode. Type "sugar" and you get every Sugar Rush variant and its modes; type a studio name and you get the whole family.

Caveats

This is derived from published math, not from live results. It tells you how the game is designed to pay, over an infinite number of spins. Your session will not look like the strand. Your session is one random path through it. The Engine Tracker shows you what live results look like; Payout DNA shows you what the game intends. Both are true.

Also: it's brand new and a bit heavy on older phones. We're working on that.

Go poke at it. /payout-dna. Tell us which strands surprised you; a couple surprised us.