A certain something: What makes crash games special?

Fair enough

For as long as wagering on games has existed, so too have the wounded cries of ‘this is rigged!’ and ‘the house cheated!’ But not with crash games.

Indeed, the vertical has implemented public seeding. By openly disclosing the specific blockchain and code used, players can verify that the crash results are indeed random and not part of the ‘House’s master plan’. Slots may still carry a generational accusation of being manipulated, but crash games have escaped that fate by allowing players to see the maths for themselves.

This feature is available on many turbo games, not just crash ones specifically. If there isn’t a seed, then a Random Number Generator (RNG) can be used instead, allowing players to verify it by a different method. People cannot understand what they cannot see, so this level of transparency immediately sets crash games apart from the rest of an online casino’s library.

Community matters

These modern online titles also have another ace up their sleeve. When you’re playing slot games, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking the algorithm is out to get you, especially when you miss out on a win by the smallest amount! However, crash games are often played by thousands of people at the same time. An undesirable result won’t just affect you, it’ll affect everyone – and there is a great level of solidarity in that.

By implementing a chat feature alongside the live online casino game, players can ask questions, share strategies and even make friends along the way. It transforms the evening from sitting at home on your phone to a social experience – something that has been reflected in the popularity of live casino games, too.

Interestingly, the same could be said for Twitch streaming. The platform invited people in to watch others play video games and socialise together. It seemed like a niche idea at the time, but it proved to be incredibly successful and entire communities were formed around watching particular streamers.

What does this have to do with crash games? Well, in 2017, Twitch introduced Drops, which meant viewers could be ‘dropped’ a gift just for being active in the stream. It boosted engagement numbers and a few years later, crash game developers would offer the same feature. This makes players feel acknowledged while boosting chat interaction and player time in the game. 

Ready, player win

Are crash games the only casino games that allow players the chance to make decisions? Of course not. Table games like baccarat, blackjack and even Pai Gow all encourage players to get involved and influence the outcome of the hand. Baccarat dates back to the 15th century and there’s proof of Senet games as far back as 3100 BC.

But all of these have rules and strategies. You have to learn how to play before you can enjoy the game, which can put a lot of people off. On the other hand, slots have no rules or strategies, but there’s no player autonomy. All you have to worry about is pressing ‘Spin’, but also… all you can do is press ‘Spin’.

Crash games offer a perfect middle ground. The ‘Cash Out’ button is elegantly simple. There aren’t any difficult rules to learn, but you still have full autonomy over the potential outcome. A win or a loss is a little bit of luck, but almost entirely down to your own decision-making. It makes you feel like you’re actually playing a game rather than having your fate in an algorithm’s hands.

An online exclusive

When the first online casinos emerged some time around 1994, they were spearheaded by basic betting opportunities and poker rooms. Around the time of the dot-com bubble in 2001, it was difficult to get people to trust online commerce enough to purchase goods through the internet. But as the opportunities of the World Wide Web continued to grow, so did online casinos. They evolved and began to offer video poker, online slots and even games developed with mobile phones in mind, can you imagine?

Yet despite all of the incredible innovation online casinos brought with them, they failed to create one thing: a new genre. If you wanted to play blackjack, you could still go to your local casino and chat to your favourite croupier; land-based casinos still get some of the most exciting slot releases even to this day; and don’t even get us started on arcade games like HiLo, Plinko or Coin Pushers. It may have taken two decades to get there, but it wasn’t until the launch of crash games that many players were finally introduced to a game that didn’t exist on the retail scene. The only way to play this game was to go to a modern online casino and test it out and, to many players, this was fascinating.

If something as simple as a line going up and down a graph was all it took to reinvigorate the iGaming industry, what else could be invented in the coming months or years? There are many aspects that make crash games special, but perhaps the most pertinent of all is that they represent a new dawn for developers, operators and players alike.

This begs the question, what other new games and ideas are currently brewing in the minds of developers who haven’t had the encouragement to voice them yet? For a very long time, it was believed that no one would play a casino game that wasn’t a traditional title or a slots game, but this idea has since crashed and burned. Turbo games, crash games, game shows and fishing-shooting titles are all ballooning in popularity – and it seems like, despite the ‘crash’ in the name, the only way is up.