What a must-drop jackpot is, and who actually calls it that
The phrase is everywhere in this trade and almost nowhere in the documents of the companies that build these products. The guarantee a reader meets on a casino page usually comes from the casino, not from the supplier.
A phrase that nobody at the factory uses
"Must-drop" is the most widely used term in this corner of the trade and one of the least documented (we met it on every comparison page we read), and the gap between those two facts is the subject of this page.
The idea behind it is genuinely new and genuinely useful, and the correction below is not a dismissal of it. Instead of a pot which grows until somebody triggers it, a must-drop jackpot carries an obligation (one written into the terms): it has to be paid out by a stated hour, or before it passes a stated value, which converts an open-ended wait into a bounded one that you can reason about.
Red Tiger invented the model, launched it in February 2019 (a secondary source for the date), and had paid out more than €25 million through it by June 2021 (a figure from an operator rather than from the supplier). Half the industry has since copied the shape of the thing, while the whole of it has adopted the phrase.
The phrase, however, does not appear in the documents of the company that built the product. We read the Evolution page for the network (Red Tiger is part of Evolution) and it does not use the expression "must-drop" once, nor describe a must-drop mechanic: it calls the product "Daily Drop Jackpots" and speaks of "network-wide prize pools" which are shared across the participating games.
That is not a trivial difference of vocabulary, because a "guarantee" is only as good as the party which gives it, and on this product the guarantee comes from the casinos rather than from the company that built the network.
What the supplier says, and what the casino says
The supplier's own page is careful and rather dry. It says that the network distributes jackpots across the participating Red Tiger games, that it gives operators of any size access to network-wide pools, and that the prizes are shared across those games rather than tied to any single title that happens to carry them. It states that there are two levels, and a British operator holding a licence describes the same two and no more.
The licensed operators go considerably further, and they are the source of every sentence a reader is likely to have seen. One British operator describes the "Hourly Drop" as falling once every hour, every hour, guaranteed, with prizes typically in three or four figures (the wording is that operator's, not a paraphrase of ours), and the "Daily Drop" as falling every single day, without exception, at a typical size of between £40,000 and £50,000.
A second source puts a clock on it, stating that the daily level has to fall before 12:00 CET, and that figure is secondary rather than primary, so we print it with its status. The operator offering the strongest guarantee is candid about its limit: the exact moment of the drop is not disclosed, and the operator calls it a mystery in so many words.
Two further things are not published at all, and their absence is worth as much as the guarantee. Neither level has a stated seed, and no minimum qualifying stake is declared; the only statement about where the money comes from is that "a portion of every stake" feeds the pot, with the network holding back 3 per cent of its aggregated funds rather than a fixed share of each bet (a figure which reaches us from one operator, and not from Evolution). The share taken per spin is nowhere published at all.
Who carries the drops
Alderney AGCC Category 1, Baytree (Alderney) Ltd · Kahnawake, Baytree Interactive Ltd
18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site
The one supplier that does use the term
Exactly one supplier uses "must-drop" in its own material, and it is the newest arrival rather than the inventor of the model.
Games Global launched Jackpot Madness on 4 August 2026 with four prize tiers across six pots (no seeds were published at launch, and nor were the eligible games), and the announcement names the mechanics that each tier carries: "Madness" is a classic progressive with no ceiling, "Mania" and "Mayhem" are must-drop levels which fall before a value the operator sets, and "Mystery" is a set of three smaller fixed prizes paid at a higher frequency.
The quotation that explains the strategy is from the company's own senior vice-president for customer experience and gaming innovation, who said that the product "expands our already potent progressive portfolio, offering balance to our big-hitting Mega Jackpots". Read against Mega Moolah, whose top level falls about five and a half times a year (9 weeks 4 days between wins, on the trackers), the word "balance" is doing a good deal of work!
One clause in that announcement matters more than the rest, and it is the clause nobody quotes: contributions, margins and payout levels are configurable by the operator, and the network can be deployed either across operators or "ring-fenced" inside a single one (both arrangements are in the announcement). The same game on the same network can therefore drop at different thresholds in two casinos, and you cannot tell from the screen which of them you are playing.
Blueprint's capped pots, which are must-drop without the word
Blueprint reached the same place from a different direction, and it did so two years before Red Tiger existed as a jackpot network (2017 against February 2019).
Jackpot King has carried three levels since 2017, and the two lower ones behave exactly as a must-drop behaves: they are seeded at about £500 and about £5,000, they are ceilinged at about £3,500 and about £35,000, and the licensed operators carrying them state plainly that each must fall before it reaches its ceiling. The top level has no ceiling at all, from a seed of £100,000 (the eligible catalogue is put above sixty games by one operator and at almost forty by another).
There is a wrinkle in the naming which we have to report rather than resolve. Two British operators give the identical pair of figures and attach them to tiers of opposite names, one calling the £3,500 pot "Royal" and the other calling it "Regal"; a third says only that the two usually restart at around those amounts (and declines to name either of them). The figures are solid and the labels that carry them are not, so we describe them as two "capped pots" and leave the nomenclature open.
A variant called Jackpot King Deluxe keeps the three levels and alters the mechanic specifically to make the two capped pots fall more often, which is the clearest statement of intent anybody has made about why the ceiling exists.
Where the term does not belong
Three products that are routinely filed under must-drop should not be, and in each case the correction comes from the supplier's own documents.
Dream Drop is the most frequent error. Neither Relax Gaming nor any operator carrying the network declares a deadline or a ceiling at which a level has to pay; one trade report mentions a "must-hit element" without attaching any temporal rule to it (the phrase is that report's own), and a must-hit element without a rule is not a guarantee of anything. The Mega is capped at €10 million, which "bounds" the prize without obliging it to fall (a ceiling, and not a deadline).
Pragmatic Play's "Drops & Wins" is the second, and it is a category error rather than a detail: the official terms describe a promotion with a fixed prize budget of €25,480,000 across the network (the campaign we read ran from March 2024 to March 2025), together with 364 daily tournaments and 364 daily prize drops (about €40,000 a day in the first and €30,000 in the second), and with no seed, no pool and no contribution from stakes at all. Undistributed prizes are carried forward to the next phase, which is a marketing arrangement and not a jackpot mechanic.
The third is a product that does not exist. Several pages refer to historic must-drop jackpots from Microgaming in the years before the Games Global rebrand, and we could find no source of any kind for one (we looked for a product name, a press release and a set of terms). The only Games Global product with an explicit must-drop mechanic is the Jackpot Madness of August 2026.
A fourth claim deserves its own warning, because it concerns the level count rather than the mechanic. One source describes three Red Tiger levels by adding a "Super Drop" between the hourly and the daily, and neither Evolution nor the licensed operator we read confirms it; we therefore publish two levels, note that an operator may configure intermediate tiers of its own, and decline to present a third as part of the standard product.
How to read a must-drop promise
The question you want answered is never whether a jackpot is a must-drop, since the label is applied by whoever happens to be writing the page. The question is who has undertaken the obligation, and in what document.
If the obligation is in the supplier's material, as it is for two tiers of Jackpot Madness (Mania and Mayhem) and for the capped pots of Jackpot King, it holds wherever the network runs. If it is in an operator's terms, as the hourly and daily guarantees of the Red Tiger network are (two levels, with a clock each), it holds at that casino and tells you nothing about the one next door; and if it appears only on a comparison site, it describes the trade's habits rather than the product.
We would also read the mechanic before believing any of it, because a guaranteed drop still reaches somebody through a wheel. On the Red Tiger games three jackpot symbols in normal play open a "Jackpot Wheel" (the mechanic is described by a licensed operator), and it decides which drop is won. The payment is immediate, and the amounts and the timings sit in a column on the left of the screen, which is more disclosure than most of this trade manages!
Three casinos with drop networks
Aladdin SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, remote casino and bingo, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCCVisit
Big Thunder SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd · Alderney AGCC outside Great BritainVisit
Express WinsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd, white label domain in the public registerVisit
18+ · Sponsored link · Terms on the operator's site
Questions
What does must-drop mean?
It means a jackpot that has to be paid out by a stated time or before a stated value, instead of growing until somebody triggers it. The Hourly Drop of the Red Tiger network falls once every hour and the Daily Drop before midday every day, and on Jackpot King two of the three pots fall before their own ceilings.
Are must-drop jackpots guaranteed?
The guarantee is as good as whoever gives it, and that is the point worth checking. Evolution describes its product as Daily Drop Jackpots and never uses the phrase must-drop at all; the wording about every single day without exception comes from a licensed operator. The one supplier using the term in its own material is Games Global, for two levels of Jackpot Madness.
What time does the Daily Drop jackpot fall?
The level has to fall before 12:00 CET according to one operator, and another states only that it falls every single day without exception. The exact moment is not disclosed, and one licensed operator calls it a mystery in so many words.
How many levels does the Red Tiger drop network have?
Two. Evolution and a licensed British operator both describe an Hourly Drop and a Daily Drop and nothing else. A third source adds an intermediate Super Drop, which neither the supplier nor the operator confirms, so we do not present it as part of the standard product.
