Gaming Strategy
The design of the guaranteed minimum in gaming strategy, although each game costs money, which is different from the usual profit model of mobile games, I believe the guaranteed minimum is also meant to create a "finish line." This concept is also known as the ceiling in some gaming machines. To make players feel closer to the finish line, some adjustments can be made.
PS. I think each game leads players to imagine different "finish lines," for example, designing 3, 4, 5 Scatters to get different rounds of Free Game (simply increasing the number of rounds does not enhance the anticipation much, but adding some Locked Wilds or other features to highlight multiple rounds will make it much stronger). Players will not just aim for 3 Scatters to enter the Free Game, but will also imagine the scenes entering with 4 Scatters or 5 Scatters, before the anticipation of Free Game raining coins (normally, machines that win over a certain multiplier will have a coin raining effect), which can make players want to strive for a result, the more things there are to strive for, the stronger the desire to keep feeding banknotes into the machine becomes.
Without guaranteed minimum design – Increasing the probability of starting Free Game
This is a straightforward and forceful method, but usually not effective. It's a simple issue, if you increase the probability of entering Free Game from 0.2% to 0.4%, you need double the Free Game RTP. Can the game really afford that? If you don't want to increase RTP, then you have to lower the Pay of Free Game? Can this feature be memorable for players? These are questions worth considering.
Guaranteed Minimum Design
This is easy to understand. Once you incorporate a guaranteed minimum design, the finish line is already set on the screen. For players, they can clearly know how many more rounds they must play to definitely enter Free Game (although there's still a chance to enter directly). Another design is that reaching the guaranteed minimum rounds does not guarantee entering Free Game, but if entered, it guarantees a score above a standard.
When a game is designed with a guaranteed minimum mechanism, there will be behavior of hoarding machines (that is, playing specific machines, usually because the guaranteed minimum rounds are nearly full). Everyone wants to press only the last round, I guess the designers of this game mode expect players to consider the sunk cost (the amount already put into the machine) as part of the cost, enhancing the feeling that players must press out the guaranteed minimum, not wanting to stop, and pushing to the limit.
However, the number of guaranteed minimum rounds is usually not low. After visual enhancement, players will treat it as how many more rounds are needed to enter Free Game, ignoring the original probability. Moreover, the time cost of hoarding machines is high. If you want to find the machine closest to the guaranteed minimum rounds, theoretically, you need to check all the machines. The behavior of hoarding machines itself has no gameplay, but it is a prerequisite operation, will customers continue to choose this game? I personally would not.
Conclusion
Actually, I think there is a fatal flaw in the guaranteed minimum design—lack of randomness. If the guaranteed minimum rounds are 800, for a player like me, it means 800 bets is a cycle. A game with a regular cycle is easily defined by players as having been "broken through," and they may lose interest in the game. In my first paragraph, I specifically noted frustration > expectation, some might think that frustration greater than expectation psychologically tends to not play, right?
But in fact, besides the rewards given in the game that make you willing to indulge repeatedly, moderate frustration is also key to making players "addicted." For a player type like me, my patience limit for entering Free Game is about 200 times.
I think everyone needs to completely put themselves in the player's shoes when designing game values. When you put in a thousand dollars, you would hope to at least see what kind of scene. Maybe you don't represent your company's game audience, but first create what you like, then you can advance to designing games that the market likes. It's easy to spend RTP in a gambling game, but RTP is your cost, don't easily invest any penny unless you think it's worth it.
