Red Tiger is one of the most well-known slots companies in the world – despite not really existing anymore.
It’s hard to know how to rank slots companies, but the popularity and availability of their games is a good enough way for us, and by that measure, Red Tiger is a giant predator of the slots world. It is current rated as the 4th biggest UK slots provider using those metrics and has recently been the biggest.
While it might be a nice pun to call this big cat of a company a predator it has in fact between snaffled up itself not once but twice.
The first meal was when NetEnt – who we’ll talk about a bit more later – ate up Red Tiger.
Then, NetEnt was in its turn subsumed into Evolution Gaming.
Red Tiger still exist as an independent entity of a sort, and its games are branded with the company’s original name and logo.
Red Tiger was founded in 2014. They have bases in the UK, on the Isle of Man, Malta (the European hub of the slots industry) and Bulgaria.
When NetEnt took them over in 2019, paying an initial £200 million for the company, they reportedly had fewer than 200 employees and were earning around £18 million a year. Red Tiger back then had a relatively small stable of games. It was by no means a giant but had produced several hits, most notably the pirate-themed series Pirates’ Plenty.
It is only since joining NetEnt that Red Tiger has shot to the top end of the UK casino charts. NetEnt were already a giant, you see, the makers of the country’s favourite slot game, Starburst, and a load of other top 10 hits. NetEnt games were everywhere. So Red Tiger immediately got massively increased visibility and distribution.NetEnt got a developer who had good ideas. And they’ve both done very well out of the deal in our opinion.
However, NetEnt didn’t stay free for long. In December 2020, Evolution Gaming, owned more than 96% of the shares in NetEnt, paying nearly €2 billion for the company.
Evolution Gaming are a massive producer of live casino games. The purchase of NetEnt makes them, as a group, one of the biggest slots companies in the world – by some measures, NetEnt slots had nearly a fifth of the world market and nearly a third of the European market for slots. NetEnt were also one of the major producers of live games.
What this means for players might be a matter of debate. However, there’s no doubt that all markets tend towards monopolies – we can see this accelerating in markets like tech, where web markets have quickly been whittled down to a small number of incredibly dominant large sites, Google for search, Facebook in social media, for example.
Players need to be aware that they are being offered choices where there may not be as much choice as they believe.
You need to play slots safely and that means playing them at legally mandated sites (in most jurisdictions).
Red Tiger has four licenses.
That’s a very typical set of licences taking in most of the major European gambling hubs.
Red Tiger also has memberships in industry bodies and its games are audited.
The company has won many awards, including:
Red Tiger games can be played safely and with confidence.
Red Tiger has two customer groups: you, a slots player, who wants to play fun games that might reward you with a prize or two, and, them, the company that owns and operates the casino or slots site that you play these games at.
Your interests are not always the same as theirs.
So Red Tiger needs to produce games that offer an entertaining experience and that players enjoy using. And casinos need those players to spend as much time and money on their site as possible.
Both of those things can exist comfortably together at the same time – can’t they?
We’ll cover some aspects of safe gaming later on. Red Tiger’s offering to these two groups of people are divided between Games, and Engagement and Back Office. Games we’ll move onto, and under the Engagement category, we find the company’s jackpot networks like the Daily Drop Network, an innovative set of games that pay out to a timetable, giving players the impression they have more control over the outcome. The company also has a more traditional set of progressive jackpot games.
Red Tiger also offers a marketing tool called Smart Spins. The company also helps casinos set up tournament play.
Red Tiger currently has 197 games available in the UK market. Of these 191 are video slots, two of them are classic slots, and there are four casino games, three card games and a roulette game.
These are the company’s biggest hits at the moment.
This version of this game was released in May 2019, but the game has a very long history, including as a massive hit physical slot in the UK. It’s a video slot, but with very classic features, including a symbol set of cards, fruits, and pots of gold. The game’s top prize is a 500-times stake, with betting from 0.1 coins to 200 coins. The classic set-up features five reels and three rows and 20 pay lines. The bonuses are confined to the main game, with bonus symbols and giant 3 by 3 symbols. There is an RTP range of around 96.17% and the game is low variance (also volatility). These measures are just about the only ways we have of comparing games, but neither is a predictor of how your experience with a game will go.
Red Tiger takes their big cat to the jungle for this April 2021 game. The headline rewards are Wild Rewards, a coin collection mechanism, and wilds that increase in power. The game has a classic game set-up but with an extra row of symbols for a 5 by 4 grid with 30 pay lines. Gold coins allow players to upgrade features, unlocking wilds that become progressively stacked, have random multipliers, and finally both. The pay table has card symbols topped off with snakes, maps, compasses, and treasure chests. The RTP on this game is 94.68%, which is quite low, the variance is high (which is high!). The top prize is a 3,800-times stake and you can bet from 0.1 coins to 10 coins. Primate King showcases a couple of things that you can take as read with most Red Tiger games: great look, great playability, and a great soundtrack.
Rainbow Jackpots is an Irish-themed game, with the obligatory leprechaun, bright green backdrops, and fiddly-diddly tunes on the soundtrack. Like most games in this genre, it is also heavily aimed at big prize chasers. The headline features are a free spins round that can award up to 100 free spins, a beer bonus multiplier, and mega symbols and symbol swaps. The game has RTP ranges, around 96.15%, and the game is medium to high variance. The set-up is a 5 by 3 reel set with 20 pay lines. The pay table is very typical with cards, top hats (green wouldn’t you know) horse-shoes, and shamrocks. There’s a gold coin wild and scatters award free spins.
If you’ve played at any UK slots site then you have probably seen Gonzo’s Quest. This NetEnt title is one of the biggest hits in slots history, it has been around for years, with its innovative tumbling blocks setting off an avalanche of copycats. The tale behind it is in fact really horrific – like most colonial histories – but the game, erm, ignores that and makes it all fun. This is a sequel, giving the game a Megaways make-over. Megaways is a gaming engine that typically offers a-typical reel sets with respins, higher variance, very big-top prizes, and over 100,000 ways to win. All of those things are in place here, with a 20,000-times stake top prize, multipliers on wins and respins, wilds, free spins, and a set of six reels with different sized blocks filling up space. The game uses the same South American-civilisation style blocks as the original. There is a range of RTPs around 94.66%.
Another Megaways title, this time a revamp of one of Red Tiger’s old hits, this game was released in April 2021, joining an already quite big set of pirate games from this developer. Megaways means big prizes, and here it’s more than 10,000-times stake, from a huge number of ways to win (more than 200,000), and irregular reel sets – in this case, six reels, with up to six rows, and a horizontal reel on which is played a bonus game with ships and maps. This is a sophisticated game with loads of game-play interest, including giant wilds with multipliers, and a free spins round. The game comes with RTP rangers around 94.75% and it is, like many Megaways games, high variance.
July 2020 saw Red Tiger releasing this very classic fruit machine game modelled on two-screen fruit games from ye olden days of the pub fruity. It has rtp ranges from 94.78%, with a top prize of 2,500-times stake, medium variance, and 20 pay lines on a 5 by 3 grid. A few classic Red Tiger features pop-up here, including no free spins, giant symbols, and bog prizes, delivered via a top screen. The pay table is very classic with cherries, lemons, bars, stars, horseshoes, bells, and 7s. The betting runs from 0.1 coins to 40 coins.
Another recent release, this game came out in April 2021 and hopes to reel in players with a 5,000-times stake top prize – a decent standard for a Big Prize game. It looks very like the Cash Volt game, with a second screen prize ladder delivering the big prizes. You’ll also see the giant symbols that are seen a lot in this list. RTP ranges are also a feature too, with a 94.78% basis for the range. The game has a classic layout with 30 pay lines, on which you can wager between 0.1 and 100 coins.
Another April 2021 release, and another big prize game, this time offering up to 10,474-times stake in a Megaways that has all the virtues of that game engine – huge numbers of bonus games, huge prizes, high variance, and novelty in the gameplay.
Released in November 2019, this is a mining/gold-rush game with a set of increasing-power wilds very like those in Primate King. It’s heavy on the bonuses, with a big top prize too, well over 5,000-times stake awarded from a 5 by 4 grid with 20 pay lines.
We end this list still in the top 100 of UK titles. This is a Chinese-culture themed game, with the main focus being on lucky coins, including Red Tiger’s famous Mega Symbols, that can deliver up to 1,380-times stake. It’s a 5 by 3 game, with RTP ranges around 96%, low variance (unusual for Red Tiger), and a big betting game going up to 500 coins.
We’ve shown in this article that Red Tiger are massively respected in the industry and licensed four times over. However, you need to make sure that you only play their games at licensed sites that you are legally allowed to play at. Do that, and do some study on safe gambling behaviours and cyber-security and you should have a safe time playing Red Tiger slots.
A casino with a good supply of Red Tiger slots might be a Red Tiger casino. There’s a lot of those. The company themselves list the likes of Paddy Power, betfair, PokerStars, William Hill, GVC, Casumo, Bet Victor, betsson, Mr Smith Casino and many more as their partners. The site with the most visible Red Tiger presence at the moment is William Hill.
To play for real money you need a licensed casino site. You can find those using our site or with a Google search – make sure you check out licensing and site safety before you play at any site. Then you’ll need an account and some cash. You can cash up your account with debit cards, e-wallets, pre-paid cards, and – sometimes – crypto currencies. You may also need to confirm your age by uploading copies of ID documents like passports and driving licences. Then play safely and enjoy!
If you have a casino account you can usually play games for free, by selecting demo mode. It’s also not uncommon to find free versions of games available at review sites and at the company’s own website. These sites are usually not licensed for gambling, but still need to ask you to provide a date of birth that makes it legal for you to play.
Red Tiger slots are random. That is part of the deal with all legal slots. That means that if anyone tells you that you can use skill to win on these games they are lying to you. It’s a better idea to learn how the games operate, how to work out which offer the best returns (using RTP and volatility) and to learn how to play safely than to think about winning big.
There is one exception to the skills rule, and that is in Progressive Jackpots, and particularly in Red Tiger’s Daily Drops jackpots. The introduction of a time-limited prize means that if you know a jackpot has to pay out at midnight, it hasn’t yet paid out, and it’s 11.59pm, then you may be slightly increasing your chances of winning it to play at that time. However, the likelihood is that 10,000 other people – these sites rely on big networks to build up their prize funds – have also seen this fact and are also playing, with just one allowed to win the big prize.
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