Octopus Gaming

About the Company

Octopus Gaming is an online casino games provider with offices in St. John's, Antigua. Ownership of the company is unknown as of October 2017 and the website makes no mention of licensing, testing or other regulatory matters.

The games on offer were originally marketed as TopGame, a company with a troubled and confusing past. Pragmatic Play reportedly bought the assets, or some assets of the company before appearing on the scene virtually overnight in 2015. Many industry observers felt that Pragmatic Play was simply TopGame in disguise, trying to distance themselves from a poor reputation. However, this was never proven and although the company has remained non-transparent on the matter, they have moved on to receive licenses from most of the world's important regulators.

Sometime in October 2017, Pragmatic Play removed most or all of the games from their website that were created before the acquisition. These games along with all known others created by TopGame now appear on the new company's website. The domain registration history is a little blurry, not lining up with internet archives of the site, but the registration was updated on October 1. Octopus social media, Facebook and Twitter accounts, were created in November 2016 and bear the current company logo. Due to some crafty coding or odd coincidence, internet archives of Pragmatic Play fail to show the games which appeared on their website as recently as August 2017 and probably later.

Depending upon where a visitor is located, games from Pragmatic Play and the new company appear at online casinos such as 7Spins who carried TopGame content as long ago as 2008. Unless Pragmatic Play makes a public announcement as to their ownership of the newer company and whether the software and games fall under their licenses, we would wait for validation from a regulator before assuming the RNG, games, and software are tested, certified, or licensed.

Poor Quality Assurance in the Past

In 2009, it was found that several progressive jackpot slots from TopGame including Diablo 13, Dougies Delights, and Wild Sevens were missing jackpot symbols from the 1st and 5th reels. This made it impossible for the jackpots to be won and lowered the overall RTP of the games. The software provider did compensate players, but not until after several conflicting versions of the reasons why this occurred, including an accidentally deployed test configuration, dubious statements that the affected games were only available for less than 36 hours, and a variety of other confusing explanations were given. It should be mentioned that the versions of Doughie's Delights and Diablo 13 that we've tested recently do not offer progressive jackpots.

As of October 18, only one game seems to be shared between Pragmatic Play and Octopus Gaming and that is Jacks or Better video poker. The user interface is different but the game logo of a one-eyed Jack in a circle with the words, "Click on cards to hold" as well as the pay table graphics, 9/6 payout, card graphics, background, etc., are identical.

It's unclear at this point if any casinos carrying the new brand of software will accept US players. It would appear as if they will not. As recently as August, we were able to log into some former TopGame casino accounts and geo-location software simply removed any Pragmatic Play games from view. Now, we are unable to log into those accounts from a US IP at all. While this proves nothing, it does indicate that Pragmatic Play may have insisted on this or the timing of another policy change by the casino owners, Engage Entertainment, or two separate affiliate programs (Revenue Giants & Deckmedia) came into effect coincidentally.

Final Analysis

Until and unless Pragmatic Play makes a clear statement about their (former?) assets we'll leave it to readers to conclude whether or not they own Octopus Gaming and even whether or not former TopGame owners hold equity positions in the IBID Group, who control Pragmatic Play. And, while TopGame representatives promised as long ago as 2009 that the software would undergo testing, auditing, and certification, that has never occurred with these games to the best of our knowledge. Pragmatic Play does have a certified RNG, but we can't know whether it still has anything to do with these games. Octopus Gaming would do well to certify a range of control operators may have over the games' RTP at a minimum, along with providing a verifiable software license and RNG certification.

Octopus Gaming History