The word the supplier has never used

Every page in this business calls these jackpots "must-drop", and the company that built them does not. Evolution, which owns Red Tiger, publishes a product page under the name "Daily Drop Jackpots Network", describes prizes shared across the network of participating games rather than tied to one title (its words, read in 2026), and nowhere on it uses the expression (two words, hyphenated) that the whole trade has settled on.

That is not pedantry, because the thing the phrase promises is a guarantee, and a guarantee is only worth what the party giving it is worth. The sentences that promise a drop come from operators: Playzee (a British casino whose licence obliges it to describe the mechanics correctly) writes that the large pot falls "every single day, without exception", and a second house puts the deadline at noon Central European Time (a figure we have from one source only).

The supplier says neither. What the supplier says is that it gives operators of any size access to "network-wide prize pools" (a phrase about distribution, not about timing), and the difference between those two kinds of sentence is the difference between a contract and a description.

Two suppliers do use the words in their own material, and it is worth knowing which they are; Games Global uses them for two of the bands inside Jackpot Madness, and Blueprint uses them for the two capped pots inside Jackpot King. Red Tiger, which invented the model both of them are answering, is not one of them.

Two levels, and the third one that keeps appearing

Evolution says there are two, an hourly pot and a daily pot, and Playzee, reading its own game rules, also says two, with the names "Hourly Drop" and "Daily Drop" and nothing whatever in between. A third description circulates, from a large cryptocurrency casino (not a licensed operator in the markets we cover), which inserts a "Super Drop" between the two and calls it a medium pot falling several times a day.

Neither the supplier nor the licensed operator we read confirms anything of the kind, so we have left the "Super Drop" off the ladder above; it is possible that some operator configurations add an intermediate band, and it is equally possible that somebody wrote a sentence nobody checked. The two that are confirmed have very different characters.

The hourly pot pays prizes typically in three or four figures (hundreds and thousands, not tens of thousands) and falls once every hour, every hour; the "Daily Drop" is the headline, typically worth £40,000 to £50,000, and it is the one carrying the promise about midnight and midday. When exactly either of them lands is not disclosed, and Playzee is refreshingly direct about it, calling the moment a mystery outright.

You can see the current amounts and the countdowns in a column down the left of the screen (which is unusual, and useful), which is more than most networks offer, and what that column does not show is the one thing we would want to know.

How the round works, and where the money comes from

Three jackpot symbols in normal play open the "Jackpot Wheel" (three, anywhere, with no payline rule), the wheel decides which of the "drops" has been won, and the prize is paid immediately rather than held for a bonus round. There is no "side bet" to buy and no separate feature to unlock, which puts this network in the same family as the Blueprint pots.

The "pool" behind it is shared, which is the architectural point of the product: the amount on the screen is the same amount for every slot on the network, so a player moving between titles is chasing one figure rather than several (which is the opposite of the NetEnt architecture). Red Tiger built this in February 2019 and had paid over €25 million through it by June 2021 (the only cumulative figure anybody has published for the network).

Where the contribution is concerned, this network is quoted in a way no other is. The figure in circulation is that Red Tiger sets aside three per cent of "aggregated funds" for the network, which is not a percentage of a single stake at all but a percentage of a pool of money, and the per-stake share has never been published by anybody we read.

That distinction matters more than it looks, and how a pot grows sets out why: a share of each stake is a figure a player can check against a game's return, while a share of aggregated funds is an accounting arrangement between a supplier and its operators (and tells a player nothing at all). An operator does state that "a portion of every stake" feeds the pot, without ever saying what portion!

The two lists Playzee publishes, and why they are not the same list

Here is a detail that almost nobody notices, and we did not find it in a tracker or a press release but on a licensed operator's own page. Playzee publishes two separate lists of Red Tiger games: one of the titles that carry the drops, and one of the titles that carry an ordinary "progressive". The two lists do not overlap at any point!

On the drops it names Gonzo's Quest Megaways, Piggy Riches Megaways, 10001 Nights, 777 Strike, Cash Ultimate, Thor's Vengeance, Trillionaire, Regal Streak, Reel Keeper and Cash Volt. On the ordinary progressives it names Devil's Number, Dragon's Luck Power Reels, Dream Destiny, Joe Exotic, Reel King Mega, Reptizillions Power Reels, Pirates Plenty, Rainbow Jackpots, Wild Hot Chilli Reels and Riddle of the Sphinx.

The consequence for a reader is immediate, and we would put it ahead of everything else on this page. A Red Tiger slot with a jackpot counter on it is not necessarily a Daily Drop slot, and the "counter" you are looking at may belong to a pot with no deadline attached to it whatsoever, which is the opposite of the reason most players open these games.

The network was large by 2021, with one casino listing 166 participating titles (in June 2021, which is the only count we have), and no supplier list of the catalogue has ever been published; the two lists above come from an operator and describe that operator's own selection.

What survives of this network, and what it is really for

One worry can be put aside straight away, since we went looking for it. When Evolution announced the decommissioning of fourteen NetEnt titles and one Red Tiger title with effect from 28 May at ten in the morning Central European Time (Happy Panda, Sparks, Magic Portals and a dozen others), no game carrying a progressive jackpot appeared on the list at all. What the product is for is a different question from what it pays.

Nobody will retire on a Daily Drop, and the whole design is an argument that a prize you will actually see beats a prize you will read about: a pot of £40,000 that falls every day is a different proposition from a pot of £2 million that falls once in a year and a half (which is the observed interval of the WowPot summit).

Set against the two networks built on the same premise, we make it the only one of the three where the timing is stated and the only one where the contribution is quoted as a share of funds rather than of stakes. Dream Drop states instead that every stake has the same chance of starting the round, which is a guarantee about fairness rather than about the clock.

A "drop" and a "flat chance" are not two names for the same promise. For the pots where an interval has actually been measured rather than promised, how often they fall has the figures, and they run from two hours and thirty-eight minutes (a Playtech band) to eleven years (a Playtech pool, as it happens).

Three casinos that carry the drops

• VideoslotsMGA/CRP/258/2014, Videoslots LimitedVisit
• Big Thunder SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCC outside Great BritainVisit
• Aladdin SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, remote casino and bingo, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCCVisit

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