Download Free Slot Machine Apps
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All the modern slot machine apps require in-app purchases for more coins/chips. My folks would never understand the concept of an in-app purchase thus I wan't an app I can buy outright. They would be playing on an iPodTouch (4th Gen) and an iPad Mini 2.
Also if the game has multiple types of machines it would great if at least one was the standard three tumbler interface for familiarity. The key I'm looking for his NO in-app purchases for coins/chips and horizontal big interface.
I'm mystified why the slot machine apps are so popular. I've never played one, but get endless in-game adds for them. Seems like next to no interaction, just pulling the 'arm', with no real payout. At least in solitaire you make real choices. Can anyone enlighten me?
What's worse, people get "problematically involved" with slot machines three to four times faster compared to other types of gambling, Harris wrote, citing NYU professor Natasha Dow Schull and author of Addiction by Design.
Brett's gambling problem began a few years ago with bets on National Basketball Association games, followed by wagers on other professional sports. It wasn't long before his habit expanded to social casino games. Played on a mobile device or PC, even via Facebook's website, such games mimic the slot machines and card games in casinos. The key difference is players can't win real cash. They bet with the game's play money and, if they run out, they can spend real-world dollars to get more.
He started playing Zynga Poker, a slot machine game, last year. But he craved the excitement that came with betting real money. Before long, he was placing bets in a brick-and-mortar casino, much to his financial detriment. When he lost more than $5,000 through a combination of card games and sports betting, he was forced to ask his parents for money to tackle his debt. That's when he, and his parents, decided he needed to get into a recovery program.
The global audience for casino apps on smartphones reached an average of 145 million monthly active users between July 2014 and June 2015 (excluding Asia, which has not been recorded and makes up a quarter of the global market), according to SuperData Research. Gainsbury, the gambling researcher, estimates the games will draw 269 million people worldwide by 2016.
Those audiences are opening their wallets for the games too. This past July, social casino games regularly made up a quarter of the top 20 highest-grossing apps in the Google Play Store, according to App Annie, a market analytics company. Apple's App Store showed similar statistics for the month, with social casino apps consistently nabbing three spots in the top 20. Both Slotomania: Free Casino Slots and Big Fish Casino: Free Slots consistently ranked in the top 10 in both stores.
Basketball star Shaquille O'Neal teamed up with a company called PlayStudios in March to lend his likeness to two social casino games that are included in the company's MyVegas app: Caddy Shaq, a slot machine game, and ShaqJack, a blackjack title. "Once players see the game with all the lights, sounds, and features, I think it enables people to want to stay there,'' O'Neal said.
"It's not the games themselves that are addictive," said Andrew Pedersen, senior vice president and general manager of social casinos for the cable channel Game Show Network, whose GSN Games division makes casino apps for smartphones. "It's about the individuals that kind of have that kind of obsessive aspect in their own personality."
But once a psychological phenomenon is discovered and exploited, it rarely stays in just one place for long. Studying the design and effectiveness of slot machines and other forms of gambling, tech giants in the social media space have started to refine their own designs, making changes to maximize a different kind of income (advertising).
A single "game jam" event led to a data machine that ultimately pumped out a decent amount of cash: $50,000 over a couple of years. Years later, with that data (and money) in hand, the makers of this game-making machine, which focused entirely on "garbage" free-to-play slot machines, used GDC as a wake-up call to an industry where the "right" messages often revolve around listening to players, sidling up to publishers, and racking up critical acclaim. In their case, eschewing all of that worked a little too well for their comfort level.
They teamed up during the 2013 Global Game Jam to push something out that resembled the "race to the bottom" they saw on mobile platforms. Thanks to the time-restricted nature of a game jam, they opted to buy a 3D slot machine asset off of the Unity Store (a marketplace that lets game makers pay modelers and animators for unrestricted use of various 2D and 3D assets) for $15. They then spent the rest of the jam creating a system that would automatically generate the rest of the skinning needed to make this basic virtual slot machine just unique enough to be published as its own smartphone app.
"Let's customize these like other slot machine companies do," Schwartz said. "They make themed slots. What's the minimum set of things to change to make a different slot machine? Let's change the title. Change the one image on the reel that might be relevant to your topic. So, like, a dolphin slot: put a dolphin in there [as the jackpot slot logo] with a special icon. Then the background is a scrolling dolphin image."
As a result, with the press of a single button, a Unity script could put those steps together and essentially auto-generate hundreds of "custom" slot machines. Schwartz and Scott confirmed that their automated system's scraping of public images exposed one issue: Google Image Search would throw up errors for exceeding the rate limit. "We found a use for Bing," Schwartz said in a phone interview with Ars. "Its image search had a number of things that were looser. I'm not trying to knock them, but they have a reputation for being second class. That felt like a kindred spirit for what we were trying to achieve here."
With that slot-creation template set, the team automated the process of feeding information to Google Play (a much easier marketplace to exploit than iOS at the time) and creating publicly available freeware slot machine apps with ads. One simple Selenium script later, and that process was done.
They attached mobile ad network Playhaven to the whole thing because the duo's philosophy was that they never wanted to take actual money from users who would download their bizarrely named apps. They then "walked away" for two months. After that period of dealing with real-life work, they peeked at their income and advertising statement and were stunned: people were downloading their apps, and 27 percent of those people were clicking on their ads, driving roughly $211 of ad revenue per day.
The team came up with a theory: "All of our advertising keywords were related to casino related content," Schwartz said to Ars. "We had an epiphany: our game looks so fucking terrible, but people downloaded it for some reason. When they see an ad for a much better slot machine or casino, they click it because... of course you do! That's a greener pasture! A way better future you could be having! We think the quality was so low in our shit that the ads were a portal to a better world."
Yet the duo incredulously admits that its average rating for many of the apps was in the four-star range and that reviews were quite kind. One review stood out to Scott, for the auto-generated "3D Bowling Slots" app: "Someone wrote that they were disappointed that the slots didn't have much to do with bowling."
The engineering half of their brains wanted to see how far this enterprise could take them. So they began tinkering with the existing template with things like the automation of slot-machine descriptions.
Schwartz and Scott also paid a small Romanian studio a pittance to build a higher fidelity slot machine, which they eventually discarded. That happened in part because the duo's mix of newer full-time work and ethical concerns crowded out their excitement and availability.
"Someone said, you could raise money on this idea, or sell this data to someone else, or sell your company," Scott said to Ars. "We were at a crossroads where the joke was similar to the origin story of a supervillain. Do we abandon all creative pursuits to make the most intense money-making slot-creating enterprise? Or does this continue being a tiny background of 1/20 of our day?"
Eventually, the headaches of keeping up with Google Play caught up to the team. Apps were removed for violating an updated terms of service that gave Google more leeway to cut out apparent crapware. Google also updated the Web interface on a somewhat regular basis. Moving a single box a few pixels could throw a wrench into the Selenium robo-clicking works, which the team had previously designed to auto-upload 15 apps a day (Google Play's upload limit for a single developer account at the time).
At one point, the app network Playhaven called the duo with a flat declaration. "We're seeing erratic data on your account," Schwartz said to paraphrase. "We're not sure what's up. We're not interested in continuing to serve ads to your slot machines. But we want to be clear: you didn't break our ToS. You're just, I don't know, inconvenient."
Playhaven then added, "You have the worst users. People who come from your apps don't spend money." The team switched to another ad provider immediately, Chartboost. "They knew roughly what we were doing," Schwartz said. "They've been great."
"Our half-joking argument: by offering the largest target of low-quality garbage apps, these marketplaces became optimized to remove our content," Schwartz said to Ars. "You could almost say that our company trained their algorithm so that what we were doing could eventually not be possible. But we were the first to bring it to that level."
AFAIK, Pinball is purely mechanical, and as such is unlikely to be digitized. Same for the real Top Dollar. It's a shame really. With the advent of legal, online, slot gaming from reputable players in the American market (IE: You can just slot away in your house in New Jersey via MGM, Caesar's, etc.) it'd be nice to have the option.
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