Five Years After the UK Ban, Bonus Buy Is the Industry Default Outside Regulated Markets

The UK Ban

In October 2021, the UK Gambling Commission banned bonus buy slots. The rule cited RTS requirement 14A: gambling products must not encourage players to increase their stake or chase losses. A bonus buy at 100x your bet does exactly that — a player betting £1 per spin could suddenly wager £100 in a single click. The UKGC expected the industry to follow its lead.

Other regulators did not. Five years later, bonus buy is not just legal everywhere else — it is the default. The UK ended up alone on this issue, while the providers that kept the feature became the fastest-growing studios in the market.

• UK ban date — October 2021
• Regulatory basis — RTS requirement 14A
• Rationale — bonus buy encourages players to increase stake and chase losses
• Result — UK alone; bonus buy is industry standard everywhere else

What Bonus Buy Actually Is

Big Time Gaming invented the feature in 2017 with White Rabbit. Pay 100x your stake, skip the base game, go straight to free spins. The mechanic solves a real problem: high-volatility slots can run hundreds of spins without triggering a bonus round. Players want the big wins. They do not want to grind through a base game waiting for three scatters to land.

Bonus buy removes the wait. Pay the price, play the feature. The cost scales with the slot:

• Standard bonus buys — 50x to 100x the base bet
• Hacksaw Gaming slots — typically 80x to 400x
• Nolimit City — up to 2000x on games like San Quentin

The math stays the same. Buying the bonus does not guarantee a profit. The RTP on a purchased feature matches the RTP on a triggered one. You pay to skip the wait, not to win more. This is a critical point that is often misunderstood — bonus buy is a convenience feature, not a winning strategy.

The Providers Who Picked Bonus Buy Over UK Compliance

Several game providers made a deliberate decision to keep bonus buy rather than comply with the UK's ban. This decision meant sacrificing access to the UK market — but it also meant they could sell their games to every other market in the world, where bonus buy remained legal and popular.

Hacksaw Gaming launched in 2018 and built its entire catalog around the feature. Every slot includes bonus buy — no exceptions. The studio hit €137 million in revenue in 2024 with an 84% profit margin. Titles like "Wanted Dead or a Wild" and "Le Bandit" became player favourites precisely because the bonus buy feature allowed players to access the most exciting part of the game without grinding through hundreds of base game spins.

Nolimit City builds entire games around tiered bonus purchases. Games like "San Quentin xWays" and "Mental" offer multiple bonus buy options at different price points, each triggering a different feature mode. The studio has developed a reputation for creating some of the most volatile and intense slot experiences in the market — and bonus buy is central to that identity.

These providers are now the fastest-growing studios in the market, while providers that removed bonus buy to comply with UK rules have seen their competitive position erode in the global market.

Why Players Love Bonus Buy

The appeal of bonus buy is straightforward and multifaceted:

• Time efficiency — players can experience the most exciting part of a slot (the bonus round) without spending hours grinding through the base game
• Content creation — streamers use bonus buy because waiting for a feature makes bad content. Buying the bonus creates immediate action and excitement that viewers want to watch
• Player preference — many players simply do not enjoy the base game of high-volatility slots. They want the bonus features, and bonus buy lets them access those features directly
• High roller appeal — players with larger bankrolls want faster action and bigger stakes. A 2000x bonus buy on a €5 bet means a €10,000 wager — a level of action that is simply not available through normal gameplay
• Predictable cost — players know exactly how much the bonus round will cost, rather than spending an unpredictable amount chasing a trigger

The UK's bonus buy ban was based on a legitimate concern: the feature allows players to dramatically increase their stake in a single click, which could facilitate loss-chasing behaviour. However, the ban has had unintended consequences:

• Market isolation — the UK is now the only major market where bonus buy is banned, creating a divergence between UK player experiences and those in the rest of the world
• Provider flight — innovative providers like Hacksaw Gaming and Nolimit City have deprioritised the UK market, meaning UK players have access to a narrower range of games
• Competitive disadvantage — UK-licensed operators cannot offer the same game features as their international competitors, potentially driving players to unlicensed offshore platforms
• Regulatory inconsistency — other jurisdictions with strong regulatory frameworks (Malta, Sweden, Ontario) have not followed the UK's lead, suggesting that the UK's approach is not universally seen as necessary

The Broader Lesson

The bonus buy story illustrates a broader challenge for gambling regulators: in a globalised market, unilateral regulatory decisions can isolate a jurisdiction rather than protecting it. When one country bans a feature that is popular with players and profitable for providers, the result is not the elimination of the feature but its migration to other markets.

Platforms like https://spinpanda.co.uk/ operate within regulatory frameworks that vary by jurisdiction, adapting their product offerings to comply with local requirements while maintaining a competitive experience for players. The bonus buy case demonstrates the importance of regulatory harmonisation — when regulators in different jurisdictions take divergent approaches, the result is a fragmented market where players in some markets have access to features that players in other markets do not.

Five years after the UK ban, bonus buy is more popular than ever. The providers that embraced it are thriving. The UK remains alone. And the question of whether the ban actually protected UK players — or simply drove them to unlicensed platforms where bonus buy is available without any consumer protections — remains unresolved.

Source: HazReviews