DraftKings fined for online slot incapable of generating a win
gamblingindustrynews.comSo pool your users by how likely they are to notice. Reduce the probabilities of gain accordingly. Profit... Just that this time the system didn't work as expected.
Wow regs must be lax.
15ish years ago my states gaming commission would literally pull EEPROMS, stick em in a box, and make sure the Hashes corresponded to 'audited and approved' code (while also checking that win rates were set within regulations).
> In one instance, a VIP customer who flagged the issue with a video of the game being played 50 times without a win was locked out of their account and referred to gambling addiction services.
Trying to be as fair as possible: the fact that this customer is a VIP may be enough reason for sending them to a gambling addiction service. But having said that, I wish there were more resources for cases like these when you know you're in the right and yet the company refuses to listen.
At least in Europe the GDPR offers some recourse.
Shows DK doesn’t test their games before releasing to the public.
Yea, this was totally a bug and not a feature...
Never attribute to malice a plan too stupid to work when the alternative is that a tech company underinvested in QA. If they were going to rig a game they probably wouldn't do it in a way so obvious their customers immediately flagged it.
But I agree that they deserve suspicion.
Not that I have any sympathy for DK, but according to TFA, the bug was only live for one week and they refunded all money spent on the game during that time period. It also sounds like they fixed it on their own, as DCP wasn’t alerted about the issue until threes days after DK noticed it - it’s unclear from my reading what the exact order of events was but it seems: customers complained, DK looked into it, ID’d the bug and issued refunds, and notified DCP.
Their handling of a player being banned and referred to resources for a gambling addiction is probably the crappiest part of their response imo
Most likely started as a bug but then nobody wanted it fixed.
i.e.: This bug has been locked by the CEO as WON'T FIX
> In August, the company reported Q2 2024 revenues of $1.1 billion, up by 26% year-on-year.
Jeez. Talk about opportunity cost.
That $19,000 fine is sure gonna hurt their $1.1 billion profit.
granted, the article says the bug lasted about a week, making $23,000 on the bug, and refunding all players before any intervention.
it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts
Re: how could they have handled this better, they could've caught this on the first or second day.
No one should need to tell you that an easily measurable and obviously critical metric is wrong. You should have alerting in place for that. A difference of 95% to 0% should light up like a Christmas tree.
If you release a game that's impossible to win, you didn't do a meaningful amount of testing or QA when it hit production. I assume a dev played at least one game as a sanity check, but they didn't sit there and play until they won. A QA person wouldn't sign off on something if they only observed 1 of the 2 states it should reach.
I used to work on these sort of games and one would play a few rounds to get a feel that everything was working correctly and to see things like the transition to win states etc. Obviously, we wouldn’t be spending our own real money to do this: we would be playing against a dev server that produced the results. I find it hard to believe there would be zero QA before launch so I can only assume there was a mismatch between the dev and release versions of the backend.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, on the dev server
and thenSLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION=0.95
and then nobody bothered to set the environment variable on prod.$win_fraction = (float) getenv('SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION');
> but im not sure how they could have handled this better.
Immediately alert the relevant oversight body, and notify the players about the problem when issuing the refunds. Providing adequate detail in both cases.
At least, that sounds like the right approach to me though I'm just guessing. :)
yes, the lack of transparency seems to me to be the largest problem. i think their lack of transparency is a cover up in this case!
Sure, but what about their other games? And can they guarantee that this game is now "bug"-free?
Gambling is already bad enough when it is done fairly. It's essentially a license to scam people. But it's absolutely disgusting that it is even possible to turn that into outright stealing. Why is not not mandatory for them to publish full reports on all rolls so that it can be verified whether it matches their advertised odds?
> it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts
Well... just rig the machines again to give out $23,000 to the players over a handful of games!
I saw that too, but from the article the 19k fine is after they (seemingly proactively?) refunded the bets.
It _sounds_ like the fine is a result of them failing to inform users of why the refund was issued (honestly it seems like saying "hey, we found an issue, we've refunded your gambling" seems like a better bet from a customer appreciation PoV, but maybe they were concerned about lawsuits or something? but going a step further and saying "hey we found a bug, so we've refunded your bets because the bug means the game was unfair[1], and here's $50 credit on your account" seems like it would do much better, and be functionally free because it would encourage more gambling)
[1] Gambling like this is fundamentally unfair, but there's a weird pretense of fairness that gambling companies are allowed to present to the world for some reason.
Revenue, not profit.
The profit margin on virtual slot machines that never pay out is 100%.
I think giving a slap on the wrist for first offense can still be very effective, as long as subsequent offenses are harsher. Especially if it doesn't appear the offense was comitted with intentional malice, and the company did what they could to rectify it once it became known.