Microgaming vs Pragmatic Play: catalogue shape and how each publishes

Size and format mix

This site covers 295 Microgaming slots plus 58 live tables, and 729 Pragmatic Play slots plus 27 live tables. On slots alone Pragmatic's catalogue is nearly two and a half times the size.

The format families come out quite differently. Pragmatic has 392 fixed-payline slots, 138 cascading-reel slots, 128 ways slots, 50 standard video slots and 21 cluster-pays slots. Microgaming has 147 standard video slots, 71 fixed-payline, 54 ways, 16 cluster pays, 4 Link & Merge, 2 Maxways and 1 cascading-reel slot.

One caution applies. The family is read from the format text in each studio's catalogue. Microgaming's hub often records no pay mechanic, so even Soju Power Maxways, whose format field reads only “Wild Multiplier”, lands in the standard family. Microgaming's 147 standard slots say more about short catalogue entries than about simple games.

Volatility: a word grade versus a 1–5 number

Microgaming's hub publishes volatility as a word grade. On this site that gives 115 High, 74 Medium, 59 Very high, 20 Low, 7 Medium-high and 1 Low-medium, with 19 unlisted. It is a seven-step scale with in-between grades.

Pragmatic Play publishes a number from 1 to 5. The site maps each number to Very low, Low, Medium, High or Very high, which gives 273 High, 220 Very high, 129 Medium, 88 Low and 19 Very low. All 729 have a value.

So the two studios' “High” is not the same box. Pragmatic's High is a translated 4 out of 5; Microgaming's is the studio's own word, sitting above Medium-high and below Very high. Neither studio publishes where its cut points fall, so the distributions can be set side by side but cannot be read as measurements on one scale.

RTP and win caps: coverage differs first

RTP is published for 240 of Microgaming's 295 slots and 653 of Pragmatic's 729. The medians are 96.12% and 96.5%. Microgaming ranges from 91.89% (Froot Loot) to 97.49% (Dragon Dance); Pragmatic from 92.71% (7 Monkeys) to 98% (Mahjong Wins).

Win caps differ more. Pragmatic publishes a cap for all 729, with a median of 5,000× and a top of 180,000× on Peking Luck. On this site only 37 Microgaming slots (12.5%) carry a cap; their median is 10,000× and the top is 50,000× on K-POP Hunter Zeus.

Those two medians are hard to compare: one comes from the whole catalogue, the other from roughly an eighth of it. Rather than reading Microgaming's 10,000× as higher, the accurate reading is that its caps are published for only part of the catalogue.

Release years, demos and themes

Release dates exist for 235 Microgaming slots and all 729 Pragmatic slots (scheduled dates included). Microgaming runs from 5 Reel Drive in 2004 to 2026, with 60 titles before 2020 and 92 from 2024 to 2026. Pragmatic runs from 2015 to 2026, with 92 before 2020 and 320 from 2024 to 2026.

Demos run on this site for 265 of Microgaming's 295 slots and 728 of Pragmatic's 729. Themes are detected from words in titles and descriptions; both catalogues put Wealth and East Asia first and second (99 and 52 for Microgaming, 222 and 119 for Pragmatic). Third place is Sports with 26 for Microgaming and Animals with 91 for Pragmatic.

For examples: Microgaming has K-POP Hunter Zeus (RTP 95.91%, Very high), Thunderstruck II (96.65%, High, 2013) and Queen of Cairo (96.59%, Medium); Pragmatic has Gates of Olympus (96.5%, High, 5,000×), Sugar Rush (96.5%, High, 5,000×) and Big Bass Bonanza (96.71%, Medium, 2,100×).

The difference is shape and publishing, not quality

In short, Pragmatic's catalogue is larger, weighted towards the last three years, and publishes a figure for every cap. Microgaming's is spread across more than twenty years, grades volatility on a finer word scale, and publishes caps for only part of the list.

None of that says which is better. More published fields do not make better games, and a short catalogue entry does not make a simple one. The two studios record different things on different scales, and this site's comparison goes no further than what they recorded.