The ladder that only climbs at the top

A jackpot game with four levels looks like four progressive prizes of different sizes, and on several well known titles it is nothing of the kind: the lower rungs are fixed multiples of the stake, or mystery prizes drawn from a table, and only the rung at the top has any money of other players in it (on two of the nine cases below, even that much is declared only in part).

The arrangement has no settled name in this trade, which is one reason that it goes unreported. We call these games "hybrids" for want of a better word (the suppliers call them nothing in particular), and what matters about them is not the terminology but the consequence for you: a player who triggers the "jackpot round" on one of them is usually winning a fixed prize and being told that he has won a jackpot (the two are not the same thing at all).

There is nothing improper in the design (it is disclosed in the rules of each game), and we want to be clear about that before the examples start. A fixed lower tier pays out of the game's own mathematics, which means it pays more often and costs the base return less than a pooled tier would; several of these titles have excellent published returns precisely because of it (Mercy of the Gods at 96.64 per cent, Divine Fortune at 96.59).

What is improper, or at least misleading, is the presentation. A "counter" displayed above a set of reels implies that every figure beneath it is climbing, and on the games below most of those figures are not climbing at all; the "ladder" is a ladder only in the sense that it has rungs.

The nine cases we were able to document on a supplier's own page, or close to one, are in the table. Five suppliers are represented (NetEnt, Games Global, Blueprint, Yggdrasil and Pragmatic Play), which suggests that the arrangement is a convention rather than a quirk.

The nine games we could document

Mercy of the Gods, where the figures are printed

NetEnt publishes the clearest case, and it publishes it on its own game page, which is why we lead with it rather than with the better known title beside it (Divine Fortune, which comes later on this page).

Mercy of the Gods carries what the supplier calls a "Gift of Wealth" jackpot with three levels, and two of the three are declared as fixed: the "Minor" pays 20 times the stake and the "Major" pays 100 times it, each worked out on the stake of the round which triggered the feature (a £1 spin and a £10 spin do not pay the same Minor), while only the "Mega" is progressive.

The mechanism is a grid, and the grid is where the arithmetic hides. Three or more bonus symbols (each carrying a random value between 10 and 200 times the stake) open a three by five frame of gold coins; filling one row pays the fixed Minor, filling two pays the fixed Major, and filling the whole frame reaches the pooled Mega.

Set the figures side by side and the asymmetry is striking. At a stake of £1 the Minor pays £20 and the Major £100, while the largest Mega recorded on the game is €179,608 (at Betsson, on the trackers). The published return is 96.64 per cent and the base game hits something in 18 spins out of a hundred, which tells you how often a win of any size lands and nothing whatever about the grid.

So a player who fills two rows of that grid has won the second prize on a three-level jackpot and has £100, and in our view nothing on the screen prepares him for the gap!

The wheel games, where the fixed part is a multiplier

Blueprint builds the same structure with a wheel instead of a grid, and on its newer product the fixed component is wide enough to swallow the pots entirely.

Rapid Fire Jackpots, which arrived on 27 June 2024 on a title called King Kong Cash DJ Prime8, has five progressive "pots" running from £250 to £7,500 ("Mini" at the bottom and "Mega King" at the top, with the three between them unnamed in the announcement). Its wheel pays either one of those pots or a multiplier of the stake of between 5 and 1,000 times. At a £1 stake the top multiplier is worth more than two of the five pots, so the "fixed" outcome can beat the "progressive" one on the same spin.

Jackpot King works the same way with its three pots, and the operators carrying it describe the wheel as paying a "cash prize", a "large multiplier", or one of the jackpots (three kinds of outcome, of which one is pooled). The route in is the "Wheel King", reached either by an icon on the reels or by collecting fifteen "crowns" (which are gathered over successive respins, while the player decides at each one whether to collect or go on), and most of what that wheel can land on has nothing to do with the pooled money.

Yggdrasil puts the fixed element in the base feature rather than on a wheel. On Joker Millions every joker carries a "mystery win" of up to 1,000 coins (the published return is 94.3 per cent), while the pooled jackpot requires all fifteen jokers to land in a single "jackpot spin", which is why that pool has paid so rarely. The record stands at €7,831,370, won at LeoVegas on 9 November 2018, and the level has been quiet for years since.

Games Global uses the pattern on 9 Masks of Fire King Millions, where the trigger pays a cash prize of between 7 and 100 times the stake and only the "MAJOR" and the "GRAND" are pooled (both of them seeded in seven figures). That figure reaches us from a database rather than from the supplier, so we mark it accordingly.

Divine Fortune, where the page says nothing

The most popular jackpot slot NetEnt still sells is the one case we cannot classify, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to fill the gap by analogy.

Divine Fortune has the same three-level structure as Mercy of the Gods and the same three by five coin grid, with one row paying the Minor, two the Major and a full grid the progressive Mega. The official page declares the Mega progressive. About the Minor and the Major it declares nothing at all: not a value, not a multiplier, and not a statement that they are fixed.

We could assume they work like the ones on the sister title, and every page we have read on the subject does assume it. We are not going to, because an assumption that reads well is still an assumption, and because the two games were released a year apart (January 2017 and December 2018) and NetEnt chose to publish the figures for one of them and not for the other.

What the arrangement does to the proposition

The practical effect of a hybrid ladder is to move most of the frequency to the bottom and all of the money to the top, and that is worth understanding before your session rather than after it.

A fixed tier of 20 or 100 times the stake lands often enough to be part of the ordinary play of the game (a grid fills one row far more often than it fills three), while the pooled tier above it lands on the scale measured in how often these jackpots fall, which for a top level runs from weeks to years (9 weeks 4 days on one network, 34 weeks 5 days on another). A player chasing the counter is therefore paying for the bottom of the ladder with every spin and reaching the top of it almost never.

It also explains a complaint which turns up constantly on forums and almost never in print: a jackpot win that pays you a fraction of the displayed figure. On a hybrid that is not a fault, a mis-paid prize or a glitch; it is the product working exactly as designed, with a fixed prize wearing the name of a "jackpot".

One more case belongs here, because it is the newest. The Jackpot Madness network launched on 4 August 2026 with six pots across four tiers (the markets named at launch included the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ontario and Brazil), and the tier called "Mystery" consists of three smaller fixed prizes paid at a higher frequency, which puts the hybrid structure inside a product sold entirely as a progressive network!

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