Bonus buy vs bonus hunt

What each one actually is

A bonus buy — feature buy, buy-in — is a button inside the game that skips straight to the feature round for a fixed price, usually quoted as a multiple of the stake. Press it, pay it, play the round.

A bonus hunt is a session structure rather than a game mechanic. You spin the base game across a line-up of games, park every feature round you trigger without opening it, and then open the whole collection in one sitting.

The cost profile is the real difference

With a buy, the price of each round is fixed and visible, so the cost side of the session is completely determined by how many you press. Variance sits entirely in the payouts.

In a hunt, the cost of each round is itself random — one might arrive in forty spins, the next in six hundred — so the session has variance on both sides. That is why two hunts on the same line-up at the same stake can produce very different break-even figures, and why hunt cost has to be measured rather than assumed.

Why hunts became the streaming format

Hunts front-load the boring half and back-load the eventful one. A collect phase can be talked over, and the opening phase delivers a run of features back to back with a countable, named target — break-even — attached to it. Buys are eventful continuously and have no session-level arc, which makes them a worse fit for a two-hour broadcast and a better fit for short clips.

That difference in presentation is worth naming for what it is: a hunt is edited entertainment with a scoreboard bolted on. The scoreboard is real arithmetic, but the format exists partly because it makes losses look like a narrative.

Regulation treats them differently

Feature buys are restricted or prohibited in a number of licensed markets. The United Kingdom prohibits them under the Gambling Commission's remote game design rules, and the Netherlands and Belgium have moved against them too; several other regulators have consulted on the same question. The stated concern is that a purchasable feature shortens the loop between spend and outcome and makes it easier to spend quickly.

Bonus hunts are not a game mechanic, so there is nothing for a regulator to prohibit in the game itself — but the same concern applies to the player. A hunt concentrates a whole session's spend into a phase with no returns at all, and the format's own conventions ask you to keep going until the budget is gone.

Availability of a buy button also varies by studio and by market inside a single game: the same title can ship with the feature enabled in one jurisdiction and disabled in another. If you are checking whether a specific game supports it, check in the market you actually play in.

Which one to record how

If you run both, keep them in separate records. A bought round has a known price and a known payout, so its natural unit is return against price. A collected round has no individual price — only the hunt has a cost — so its natural unit is the multiplier against stake, averaged across the line-up. Mixing them produces an average that describes neither.

Our tracker is built for the hunt shape: one cost for the session, one row per collected round. A buy session is better logged as a simple list of price-and-payout pairs.