We Watched 900 Hours Of Slot Streams. Losses Accounted For Four Minutes.
A second-by-second study of 312 broadcasts found big wins were replayed eleven times on average. Losses were mostly off camera.
Over eleven weeks this autumn, four Gambling Paper researchers watched 900 hours of livestreamed slot play across 312 broadcasts by twenty-six streamers and logged every second by what was on screen. It was, the project lead wrote in her final memo, “the longest any of us has gone without blinking.”
What was on screen
The resulting chart is a single horizontal bar, and it is almost all one colour. Wins, replays of wins and reactions to wins take up 71 percent of airtime. Reading the chat aloud takes 22 percent, bonus buys, which are bought and then celebrated, another 6 percent, and the intro music most of what is left. Losses occupy a sliver at the right-hand edge so thin that our designer asked whether it was a rendering error.
Findings
- The average big win was replayed eleven times, once in slow motion and once “for the people who just joined”.
- Losses stayed on screen for an average of 0.8 seconds, usually while the streamer was already reaching for a different game.
- The phrase “we’re so back” was said 4,118 times. On no occasion had anyone been away.
- Responsible gambling messages appeared for a total of nine minutes, all of them during the intro music.
We went in assuming the losses were rare. By the third week we understood that they were just fast.
Methodology
Footage was coded by hand at one-second resolution. A loss was counted when a balance went down and the streamer’s expression did not change. A win was counted when the streamer stood up. Where a streamer stood up for some other reason, such as Dax “MaxWin” Calloway leaving to return a car, the second was marked unclassified. The dataset is available on request, although the team has asked that nobody request it.
