Feature Buy: Present Everywhere Else, Absent on British Slots

What actually happened, and when

In January 2020 the Commission announced that gambling businesses had been told to stop offering feature buy-in on slots. Its statement on the intervention set out the position: six operators were found to be offering games with a feature buy-in, including one game that charged more than £3,000 to enter the bonus feature, and all six removed the games.

The basis was not a new prohibition written specifically against feature buy. It was two existing requirements in the remote gambling and software technical standards. RTS 3 requires that an explanation of the applicable rules be easily available to the customer before they commit to gamble — and a mechanic that commits several thousand pounds in one action puts a heavy weight on whether the player understood what they were committing to. RTS 14, the responsible product design section, requires at 14A that a gambling product must not encourage a customer to chase losses, to increase their stake, or to continue gambling after a break in play.

This is a point worth being precise about, because it is almost always got wrong. There is no line in the standards reading "feature buy is prohibited". What happened is that the Commission applied the general requirements to a specific mechanic, the operators withdrew the games, and the mechanic has not returned to the GB market since. The practical result is the same; the legal route to it is different, and the difference matters if you want to describe British rules accurately.

The company it keeps

Feature buy is the most visible absence but not the only one. The responsible product design requirements in RTS 14 removed or bounded a set of mechanics that remain available elsewhere:

• Autoplay. Prohibited for GB-licensed remote gambling since 31 October 2021.
• Minimum spin duration. A floor on how fast a game cycle may complete, with the game requiring a separate action to start each one.
• Turbo and quick spin. Features that reduce the time to a result are ruled out.
• Celebrating a loss as a win. A product must not celebrate a return that is less than or equal to the total stake.
• Simultaneous play. A player cannot be offered multiple games at once on the same site.

Seen together these describe a single policy rather than five separate ones: in Britain a slot must take a deliberate action to start, must take a minimum time to resolve, must not misrepresent the result, and must not offer a shortcut past any of that. Feature buy is a shortcut past the first and second.

One game, two builds

For studios this is a market configuration question rather than a redesign. A title is built once and configured per market — RTP builds, stake ranges, available features — and the GB build is the one with the buy button switched off and the spin floor applied. The same title name, the same reels and the same paytable can therefore behave differently on two sites in two jurisdictions, and a video of the game being played elsewhere is not evidence about the GB build.

The authority for what a particular build does is the game's own rules and paytable on the site being played, which RTS 3 requires to be easily available before the player commits. That is where a feature's cost, if it has one, and the game's RTP are stated.