Bonus Buy: when does it make sense, and when not?

The button is usually on the right and promises the same everywhere: skip the wait, buy your way straight into the free spins. The price is typically 80 to 100 times your bet, and for many players it feels like a shortcut to the fun part of the game.

That is exactly what it is. But it’s worth understanding what you pay for — and what you don’t get. A bonus buy does not significantly change the game's payout percentage or your long-term expected return. It changes the pace. And pace costs money in this context.

01What a bonus buy is, technically speaking

When you buy the bonus, the game skips the base game and starts directly in the feature you would normally trigger with scatter symbols. The price is set to roughly correspond to what it would statistically cost you to play the bonus out — plus a little for the house.

Exactly why the RTP for a purchased game is often slightly different from the base game. Some providers set it a bit higher, others a bit lower. For titles marked with RTP range — such as Gates of Olympus, Gates of Olympus Super Scatter and Games in Olympus 1000 — there can even be different configurations in circulation, so the figure should be read in the game's own information screen.

The point is what the purchase doesn't do: it doesn't make the bonus better. The multipliers, symbols and outcomes are the same. You've simply paid to get there immediately.

02Where the button is located on Olympus

Buy Feature is almost standard in the genre. Among the titles in our catalog that have the feature are the original Gates of Olympus with 95,51 percent RTP and a cap of 5.000 times the stake, Gates of Olympus Super Scatter with 96,5 percent and 50.000 times, and Games in Olympus 1000 with 95,51 percent and 15.000 times.

Further out in the field: Supreme of Olympus from Barbara Bang med 96 procent, high variance and 15.000 times. Olympus Thunderhold from RTG med 95,74 procent, high variance and 2.500 times. Greek Goddess: Siege of Olympus Megaways from Playzia med 96,06 procent and 5.000 times. Olympus Trueways from BGAMING med 96,84 procent and 5.000 times. Fortune of Olympus from Pragmatic Play med 96,55 procent, Cluster Pays and 10.000 times.

Also in the Hold & Win branch the button appears — for example in Olympus Coin Link from Fugaso with 96,12 percent and 5.000 times, in Olympus Mania: Hot Bonus with 96,25 percent and 3.000 times, and in 3 Pots of Olympus from Betsoft, where RTP is not stated but the cap is set to 13.685 times the stake.

03The calculation: price, payout and variance

Set up a concrete example. Your stake is two kroner, and the bonus costs 100 times that, i.e. 200 kroner. That's equivalent to one hundred regular spins. The question isn't whether the bonus pays more than two kroner — it almost always does — but whether it pays more on average than the hundred spins you skipped. The answer is usually: about the same, minus a little.

What you actually do is compress your variance. Instead of a hundred small outcomes you have one large one. Your average expectation hardly moves, but the spread around it becomes dramatically larger. Five purchases in a row can drain a bankroll that otherwise would have lasted an hour.

In high-volatility games the effect is further amplified. If you buy the bonus in a game with a cap of 50.000 or 100.000 times the stake, much of the bonus's theoretical value lies in outcomes that practically never occur. The average purchase therefore lands well below the price — that's how the distribution looks when the tail is long.

04When the purchase doesn't make sense

There are three situations where the button is consistently a bad idea. The first is when the purchase makes up a large share of your total bankroll. If you have 300 kroner and the bonus costs 200, you've effectively bought two outcomes for the whole evening. That's not a gaming session, it's a lottery ticket.

The other is when you buy to bring something home. Bonus buys are often used as a shortcut after a bad run, precisely because it feels like an action. The math doesn't know what happened before, and the price doesn't get lower because you lost.

The third is when the game's bonus is already cheap to trigger. In titles with frequent scatter triggers and low to medium variance — such as Olympus Lightning from Wizard Games with 96,08 procent — the wait is rarely long enough for the shortcut to be worth the money.

05Alternative: Bonus Bet and increased stake

A milder alternative is Bonus Bet, also known as an ante bet. Here you typically raise your stake by 20 to 25 percent in return for more frequent bonus triggers. The feature appears in Gates of Olympus, Supreme of Olympus, Olympus Thunderhold, Sky of Olympus, Fortune of Olympus, Zeus of Olympus and Gems of Olympus.

The advantage is that you retain the base game and thus its steady rhythm, while shortening wait times. The downside is that your effective stake per spin increases, so your bankroll will last correspondingly shorter. It’s an intermediate step, not a free upgrade.

Whatever you choose, the same principle applies: decide the price beforehand. If you've said in advance that the evening costs 200 kroner, then it costs 200 kroner — even if the button is glowing. The age limit in Denmark is 18, licensed operators are supervised by the Danish Gambling Authority, you can exclude yourself via ROFUS, and stopspillet.dk is ready if gaming has started to take over.