Bonus buy

What a bonus buy

A bonus buy lets a player skip the small talk and purchase that headline outright — typically paying a multiple of the base bet to enter free spins or a feature instantly. In the right hands it is a tool for pacing: compressing a session into a concentrated burst of volatility.

In the wrong ones, it is an accelerant. For the business, it’s a design choice with consequences up and down the stack — math, UX, merchandising, compliance, and, not least, revenue timing.

Behind the sheen, the mechanics are simple.

The game offers a fixed or variable price (often expressed as 50×, 75×, 100× the stake) that gates a bonus entry. The underlying randomness remains the same; what changes is the distribution of outcomes over time.

A session with frequent bonus buys looks spikier, with long stretches of base play replaced by a handful of high-variance moments. That shift reshapes the familiar trio of metrics: first-session spend, session length, and return visits. It also reframes RTP in the player’s mind.

Most studios now publish a split — base game RTP versus buy-feature RTP — precisely so that operators can set expectations in the lobby description.

The UX and the calculus

Bonus buy lives in the space where autonomy meets friction. Players who know the brand or chase a mechanic appreciate the control: pay now, see the feature.

Newcomers can be overwhelmed by price-tags that feel abstract. The interface decisions — the placement of the button, the wording of confirmations, the availability of smaller “entry-level” buys — matter as much as the math.

So it does pacing: games that telegraph the bonus journey with clear progress cues tend to convert without the feeling of a hard sell.

💡 Disclosure is design. Publish both RTP figures (base and buy) and explain the variance in plain language. If players understand the trade, they are less likely to misread the outcome.

How operators actually use bonus buy

• Operators see bonus buy as a throttle. In peak hours, a carousel of buy-enabled titles can lift short-session ARPU and drive streams on creator channels.
  
  But the same carousel, left to run without context, shortens sessions and can chip at day-7 return. The editorial task is to place buy-enabled games where they make sense — event hubs, creator-led pages, “high-volatility” shelves — and to keep the base-game audience in view elsewhere.
  
• Providers, for their part, treat bonus buy as one lever among many. Some design families now ship with multiple buy-tiers (entry, enhanced, super) that trade price for volatility and feature density.
  
  The commercial conversation with operators is correspondingly specific: which markets permit the feature by default, which require a toggle, which prefer a limited-time activation during events. The storyline that lands best is pragmatic: the buy button is not a promise of profit, it’s a pacing option.
  
• Affiliates and creators discovered long ago what the rest of the market later codified: bonus buys make for tight stories. A three-minute clip of two purchased features tells a clearer tale than twenty minutes of base play.
  
  That audience effect feeds back into the lobby; when creator-led interest spikes around a title, operators can move the card up a row and catch the wave — provided the copy in the tile makes the feature proposition legible.

💡 Volatility is a setting, not a strategy. Bonus buy can lift short-term metrics. It needs an editorial plan to avoid cannibalizing session length and repeat visits.

Measuring popularity of games

The business question is always the same: is demand real, and are we placing the game where the audience will find it?

Macro heat: Blask Index

Market appetite moves with events — sports calendars, seasonal holidays, creator arcs. Blask Index tracks that ambient heat in near real time. When the index rises for your country, you can frame a buy-feature push as part of a broader programming block rather than as a stand-alone stunt.

Micro reality: Blask Games

At the shelf level, Blask Games turns the conversation into two numbers.

• Game Visibility Rank (GVR) is the title’s actual position in each operator’s lobby; single digits are headline treatment.
• Share of Interest (SoI) reflects how much attention the game or theme is commanding across behavioral and search signals.

🔍 Details live here: GVR and SoI.

Read them together. If creator buzz pushes SoI up for a buy-enabled title but your GVR sits in the teens, you are donating demand to competitors with braver layouts.

If your GVR is heroic but SoI is flat, the placement is doing the work that the theme or mechanic is not — time to switch the card or reframe the copy.

Teams that treat this like a newsroom — morning check of Index, mid-day scan of GVR/SoI by operator, end-week reshuffle — tend to turn “interest” into measured uplifts rather than anecdotes.

Two dials, one loop
SoI tells you what the audience is circling. GVR tells you if you put it above the fold. Adjust, measure, repeat.