Eurasian Gaming

About the Company

Eurasian Gaming (EG, or EA Gaming) is an online slot developer established in 2017. The company now has a portfolio with more than 50 titles on the market.

Founder and CEO, Saverio Castellano came into the industry via an interesting path having started out as Games and RNG regulator for the Italian state monopoly (AAMS/Sogei) in the VLT market. From there he went on to “do slots” at Aristocrat, consult at Novomatic, and founded GameART in Slovenia prior to the company establishing Malta offices and before creating EA Gaming in 2017, near Rome, Italy.

The company currently has offices, studios, and labs in Italy, Malta, and Vietnam.

Eurasian Gaming fills a unique niche in the provenance of online gambling games as many of the operators that carry its games are also USA-friendly online casinos.

That in itself is not unique but the fact that EA Gaming titles are certified in the Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian, Colombian, and other markets - Licensed by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency (ADM) as well as Curacao government and certified by Gaming Labs International (GLI) and QUINEL Limited with labs in Italy, Malta, UK, and Argentina, and ALSO appear in US-facing online casinos is a bit of magic or at least brilliance in and of itself.

While producing enough games to tickle the market is certainly part of the formula for success, there is a lot more to it than that. When I choose to play a new game without going through the casino database and filtering by the game provider, and especially if I get distracted and miss the splash screen telling me who made the game as it’s loading, I expect to recognize the maker at some level - if not on first glance, then after a few spins or looking at the pay tables to learn about the features.

I find that occurs as often as not when I happen onto a Eurasian Gaming slot - I get a feel for it and recognize it as one of a kind, even if it has certain vibes and flavors reminiscent of other games.

And then, there is the need for a developer to get their games out there but before marketing them or entering into partnerships with aggregators and other platform providers, the games have to almost be “plug-and-play” modules that can be “slapped on” to the casino operator’s platform with a single, seamless integration. Once this is perfected they can be amalgamated into an aggregator’s framework to become as good as “push-button ready” for launch to any of the provider’s clients.

And of course, with well over 10,000 titles out there already, a studio will have to make the deals that get their games into casinos in the market they have targeted to serve.

The four most important milestones we find so far in that pillar are distribution deals with Salsa technologies (formerly Patagonia Entertainment 2012-2020); integration with the EveryMatrix SlotMatrix, a position on the SoftSwiss platform, and finally a summer 2021 tie-up with Prague-based Slotegrator. A few days before the distribution deal was made, Slotegrator added two new markets raising its presence to 65 markets across six continents.

Salsa is well established in the Latin American region and SlotMatrix is currently the largest game aggregator.

No matter how complicated it is to get your product to market, and more specifically the regional markets you want to maximize exposure in - no matter how clever, crafty, or innovative a CEO and their team are - it still comes down to the quality of the games. Some aggregators have as many as 15,000 titles and some online operators have as many as 9,000 slots ready for you to play for real money any time of the day or night - in that landscape, you need more than one element to set you apart, create an impression on operators, and have players returning to your games again and again.

There might be a savant somewhere with an algorithm churning away answers to the question of what turns people on to a slot, and we can take decades of industry experience and try to examine the question from several angles, but I tend to think it is something intuitive to the player and nothing a formula could ever arrive at - we are all such different players!

However, we will look at the aesthetic appeal of the games, the animation quality, the soundscapes, and the user interface. We’ll have to take their word and that of the testing labs as far as how solid the maths are because we simply can’t divine those mysteries from looking at pay tables or even spinning a game ten of thousand times.

We might be able to determine volatility and the return to player percentages (RTP) might be public knowledge - but without a disclosure from the labs we simply can’t determine things like base game hit frequency, bonus frequency, average bonus payout, volatility of the bonus mechanic if different from the base game, and how much of the RTP is derived from the base game or the bonus - these things matter to the serious slots player, and we may not be able to answer those for you, we’ll soon discover if we can.

Personally, I’m not entirely comfortable using a bonus-buy feature without the PAR sheet to know what I might be getting into. Almost all Eurasian Gaming slots offer Bonus buys. 

Aha! And we have found datasheets for some of the games, so our analysis will a bit better than “looks nice”, “fun game”, etc.

Software and Games

All of the games are created and delivered in HTML5. That makes them load fast and they will self-adjust to any sized display - fully optimized and device-agnostic games can be played on any web browser.

Hot tip: In addition to the bonus buy feature, available on most games, a “fast play” option is available that allows for quicker play by running RNG iterations (games) in the background. Operators can also configure customized jackpots for many of the games to give players additional incentives.

According to aggregation partner Slotegrator, the top four games getting the most spins on a consistent basis are Chilli Hunter, Horus Eye, Hot Fruits, and Lady Hawk - not necessarily in that order.

The games

Players who run across Eurasian Gaming titles or seek them out by selecting the provider in an operator database may find up to four types of games; slot games, cluster games, video bingos, and fish-hunting games.

Power Play is the player-choice enhancement on the games that allows you to choose a Bonus Buy or Fast-Play feature.

On the games that we examined the bonus buy was 100x the current stake. To get free spins you would simply choose the mechanic and place a stake of $300 for the $3 paytable. We’ll take a more detailed look at the information we’re privy to, but there is not enough data to make a fully reasoned conclusion on the value of buying a bonus.

Fast-Play is easier to parse simply because there are no weightings, averages, or differentials to consider. With this feature, you simply choose the number of spins you want to do and then instantly get the normally occurring win amount instantly.

As far as the mechanics of the feature, spinning will stop when a bonus round is triggered and let you play the bonus as some bonuses require player choices and feedback.

This feature keeps all of the maths organized and the RTP will achieve actual status superseding theoretical sooner by the clock on the wall, but in the same number of games (within standard deviation from the mean) as playing one spin every 3-5 seconds or one spin a day for a thousand years.

While all other game mechanics and maths remain the same as in normal play when you buy a free spins feature, the value of that choice cannot be determined simply by the price and the RTP could undoubtedly be affected by the timing of when or how often you buy free spins. The only way this could not be so is if they have leveled out the RTP of the bonus game to be equal to that of the base game - which is rarely the case with any “regular” slot machine. More or less than 50% of the RTP is usually found in the base game and the bonus features.

For the sake of illustration let’s look at the Dragon of the Eastern Sea slot.

The hit frequency, how many spins out of 100 on average that pay anything, is 37% and it’s a low-medium volatility game (two on a spectrum of 1-5). The volatility index tells us there aren’t many wild swings in the game - no long dry spells of dead or super low-paying spins accented with the occasional medium to high-value return.

Here’s where it gets interesting considering the cost of buying free spins is exactly 100x the stake. The average win per bet is 1.4x stake on some literature (brochure, obvious typo) and 2.6x within the paytable. The rest of the data is harmonized between the paytable and datasheet.

The average win per bonus is 38x stake. Making that data more interesting is the fact they don’t list the RTP or the range of RTPs (available for different jurisdictions) on the datasheet, on the pay tables, or anywhere else we could find with the games live in operation. We tested the game at Vegas Crest.

The missing ingredients here are; Theoretical RTP, percentage of RTP generated in bonus and base game, average bonus hit frequency, and max exposure for the operator (how much you can win in one spin).

Without knowing these things we can just say - if the average bonus win is 38x bet and it’s a low volatility game, there’s no way paying 100x for an average 38x return is a good gamble. We simply can’t say that. However, it would be safe to say - if the developer-supplied numbers are correct - it would not be a good bet to do 100 or 1,000, or 10,000 bonus buys in a row.

On a personal note, given a choice between Fast-Pay and Bonus Buy, I would choose Fast-Pay every time. It’s actually a feature I have fantasized about and advocated for years. I wouldn’t use it all the time, but it’s my kind of feature!

The only games I buy a bonus on are Megaways slots - and the reason I do is their relatively high volatility that seems to be accelerated into a tighter band with bonus buys - five or six Megaways bonus buys can often get you into a reasonable facsimile of the standard deviation. As well, one spin can make or break you so it’s usually the last thing I do or a breath of fresh air for a whole new session.

With the bonus buy feature unpacked, let’s look at Dragon of the Eastern Sea from a less technical point of view:

• Configuration: 5x4, 1024 lines
• Graphics: Very nice
• Animation: Adequate, well-executed
• Base game mechanics (Scatters, Golden Reels, wilds, win celebrations, etc): Not overdone
• Reels can turn into stacked wilds in both base game and feature play
• Jackpot feature: Consecutive Golden Reels award one of five jackpots
• Bonus feature: The player determines volatility with three choices for the number of spins and multipliers
• Mobile feature: Paytable is displayed below the reels in portrait mode only

Extra reels can turn gold at random. When all five reels turn gold you win the 5 Golden Reels prize and still get to play the match-three picking game for one of the smaller bonuses.

The sound effects are really well applied and win celebrations are conservative, which leaves time to play rather than watch boisterous gesticulations over a 20x winning spin.

I especially liked the way the reels snap to their final position, it’s distinctive and telegraphs a level of finality and, somehow, efficacy.

The only thing I didn’t like is that it takes two clicks to get the reels spinning after a win, but that is a minor pet peeve. In sum, these slots come very near to being “perfect” thanks to subtle but powerful design considerations like the way the sound effects just “go away” if you stop spinning for a few seconds. It’s just a touch of class and shows how deeply every element of the user experience has been considered and accounted for.

Video bingo

So far, the studio has turned out about half a dozen next-generation video bingo titles with state-of-the-art graphics and innovative layouts. A new experience can be had simply by rotating a mobile device from landscape to portrait modes with awesome animations and sound as good as your device will deliver.

Wins in a bingo game trigger free spins in a same-themed embedded slot machine for an added bonus. Another feature that can appear is a prize wheel spin for cash awards.

Buy extra balls for more chances to win, or wait for “Jolly Balls” to trigger at random and supply more numbers to match and win a prize or make a new pattern, and increase the current prize.

Other

They also have a fish shooting game, Fish Hunter Haiba. It seems to be built on the same concept and possibly the same basic engine as most other games like it on the market but it brings in enhancements and bonus rounds. The most striking difference is the HD graphic delivery and stunning color scheme. I found myself playing far too many rounds to simply ‘test’ it because it kept leveling up and presenting newer and better mega-targets.

The Final Analysis

Eurasian Gaming delivers a high-quality portfolio of real-money online gambling games. The range of themes is broadly appealing with plenty of Asian-flavored games and a nice level of fusion with a mix of bonus mechanics to enhance the titles for players in any market. The video bingo games stand apart from many so it's no wonder SalsaTech and EG chose each other for a partnership to supply the former Patagonia Entertainment’s operating partners now and in the future.

The maths present a mix of volatility from the ultra-low variance Lady Hawk to medium-high and ultra-high volatility titles like OngBak and Blackbeard’s Legacy. Most of the slots that we dug into were on the higher end of the index, which means the average player who wins, most likely has a memorable session.

We barely scratched the surface in describing the variety, breadth, and depth of the bonus features both in base play and triggered second-screen games. The designers and developers seem to be highly conscientious about putting together just the right elements in each package to make the games truly “sing”.

Most of the underserved markets of the world have access to the games through the crypto and aggregator platforms mentioned above including EveryMatrix, Slotegrator, and SoftSwiss with a big break into LatAm with Salsa. Players in Europe, Asia, Oceania, CIS, and the Americas can find them at an increasing number of casinos.

Players in the USA can look for them at Vegas Crest, LTC Casino, or perhaps a few more US-facing sites that are worth playing. You can follow the previous links to our in-depth reviews of those operations or see if any on the rated list on this page accept players from your country.

The catalog covers all the themes we’ve come to expect of a provider, from classic Vegas fruit machines to epic fantasy adventures.