From Elden Ring Drops to Slot Reels: The Strange Truth About RNG

Dice: the simplest illustration of randomness across game platforms.

Anyone who’s farmed a Colossal Sword drop in Elden Ring for thirty hours knows the feeling. The rate is 0.1%, supposedly, but somehow your mate gets it on the second kill and you’re still grinding two weeks later. We’ve been there. The frustrating part isn’t the bad luck — it’s realising the system was never quite as random as we thought.

The same maths that decides whether a Rune Bear coughs up your loot is the maths running slot reels. Same families of algorithms. Same audit standards in some cases. And yet the way each industry talks about randomness is wildly different — and that gap matters if you ever cross from console games into online casino games.

What RNG actually is

A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is software, not magic. It takes a seed — usually the system clock or a hardware source — and produces a sequence of numbers that looks random. Looks. The Mersenne Twister, the most-used algorithm in mainstream games, has a period of 2^19937 – 1. Enormous, but not infinite. The Wikipedia entry on the Mersenne Twister gets into the maths if you want to fall down that hole.

The thing that separates a slot machine from a video-game RNG isn’t the algorithm itself. It’s who certifies it. Console games answer to publishers and Steam reviews. Slot machines answer to regulators like the UK Gambling Commission and testing labs like eCOGRA and GLI. We’ve audited the audits — and the slot ones are stricter. A poorly seeded PRNG in a single-player Souls game frustrates players. The same in a slot machine costs the operator its license.

The drop-rate lie

Here’s the bit that annoys us most. Console devs routinely lie about drop rates — or at least misrepresent them. The famous case was The Division 2’s hidden loot weighting, where Massive Entertainment quietly admitted the game was weighting drops based on player progression, not the stated percentages. Players had been computing odds wrong for months because the underlying maths was different from what was on the tooltip.

This kind of thing isn’t possible in a regulated slot. The return-to-player (RTP) figure is mathematically verified by a third party. If a slot says 96.5% RTP, that’s been measured over hundreds of millions of simulated spins, and the operator is on the hook if it doesn’t hold up. We’ve watched testers run those simulations. They’re not vague. They’re not “estimates”. They’re hard numbers backed by money on the line.

Compare that to the years of player frustration over Destiny 2’s “random” loot drops, where Bungie kept changing the algorithm without telling anyone. A major studio openly admitting that “random” was never random. We laughed and we cried.

Where we’d actually put our money (if we had to)

If we were forced to bet on which sector treats randomness more honestly, we’d pick regulated online casinos. That’s the contrarian take. Gamers don’t want to hear it because there’s a cultural assumption that gambling is dirtier than gaming. The audit trail says otherwise.

This is part of why we keep coming back to comparison platforms like Casinofy when we’re tracking which providers publish audited RTP figures and which are dodging. They aggregate the data in one place — we pulled their list of online casino games when we were writing this piece and cross-checked three titles against the providers’ own RTP reports. Numbers matched. Good signal.

Console games have a long way to go on transparency. Drop rates are still treated as proprietary secrets. Loot-box mechanics in AAA titles routinely fail the disclosure tests that slot machines passed a decade ago. The ESRB has finally started labelling games with paid random items, but the labels don’t tell you the odds. Slots have done that since at least 2007.

What this means for you

The truth is RNG is mostly hidden complexity, and the gaming industries that get audited tend to behave better than the ones that don’t. We’re not saying ditch your console and go play slots. We’re saying when someone tells you a game is “fair”, ask who’s checking. If the answer is “we are”, treat it like a sales pitch.

If the answer is “an independent lab with a regulator behind it”, believe the maths.

If the answer is “trust us, bro” — well, you’re in the same place as everyone still grinding for that Colossal Sword.

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