New Slot Sites 2025
- How many new slot sites will launch in 2025?
- Why play at a new slot site?
- Are new slot sites always brand new?
- Trends and what to expect in 2025
How many new slot sites will launch in 2025?
That, I’m afraid, is anyone’s guess. Why? Because there are government plans to overhaul the Gambling Act 2005 (the underpinning legislation for the UK gambling industry, online and offline) which have been dragging on for quite literally years. It seemed that following the publication of the Gambling Act Review White Paper, the changes would finally be decided on and implemented, but nearly two years later not much has happened and the change of government has delayed or derailed provisions that were supposed to come into force last year.
For example, slot game maximum stakes of £5 a spin (unless you’re under 25 in which case it’s £2 a spin) were supposed to be in force last September but it didn’t happen. In November, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that these limits would indeed come into force but didn’t specify when (it’s now been confirmed to be April 2025).
There’s also the small matter of the Gambling Commission consultation about wagering requirements and multi product offers, which ended nearly a year ago, and is now finally to be acted on towards the end of the year.
With all of this (plus affordability checks) still pending, it’s hardly surprising when operators are cautious about opening new slot sites in the UK. We expect a slowish start to 2025 but perhaps more launches later in the year or next year once the changes have actually happened and the effects on business are known.
Why play at a new slot site?
Many players move on to new sites because they want to claim a fresh welcome bonus offer but there are lots of other reasons why you might want to try out somewhere new.
Range of games
- You want to try some games from new providers
- You want somewhere that’s quicker to add new release games
- You’d like a bigger and better selection of progressive jackpots such as Mega Moolah, Dream Drop and Red Tiger dailies
- You’d like a better selection of non slot games – bingo, instant win, crash, live casino etc
- You’d like to be able to place sports bets or lottery bets with the same wallet
Bonuses & promotions
- You want to play somewhere that has more/better redeposit and/or stake & get offers
- You prefer free spins offers to bonus offers or vice versa, or maybe a spin the wheel style offer appeals to you
- You don’t like something in the terms and conditions at your current site – wagering requirements, bonus expiry, max conversion etc
- You’re specifically looking for prize draws, slots tournaments, player missions and/or other types of promotion that bump up the entertainment value
Trust, safety & fairness
- You’d prefer to play somewhere with a higher level of insolvency protection
- You’ve had a bad experience with customer service
- You’d be happier with the reassurance of a well known brand
- The casino you’ve been playing at has reduced the Return To Player on your favourite slot games (you can find out more about this on our Best Payout Casinos page)
User experience
- The affordability and ID checks at the casino you’ve been playing at are too intrusive
- You’d like to be able to choose from a wider range of payment methods e.g. Trustly or Neosurf
- The casino you’ve been playing at has an outdated design that no longer works well on your device of choice
- You play on your phone and would like to find somewhere with a mobile app for added convenience and security
- You’re fed up with the look and feel of the slot site you’ve been playing at and fancy a change
New slot sites are safe to play at as long as you stick to sites that are licensed by the UK Gambling Commission. The slot games themselves are checked for fairness and the operators have to meet responsible gambling safety standards. We only review UK licensed sites and for added security, we also report on each site’s level of players funds protection.
Are new slot sites always brand new?
A new site doesn’t necessarily mean a brand new operator! It can be any of the following:
- New site on a new platform – it’s rare to see independent slot sites which are genuinely and completely new to the UK but they do appear from time to time e.g Space Casino. As these operators have recently passed the rigorous vetting procedures for a UK Gambling Commission licence, players can feel confident about giving them a try.
- New site on an existing platform (skin) – the site’s owner may or may not be new to the industry, but the casino software, management and licensing is supplied by a white label provider such as Jumpman, Grace Media or Progress Play. There’s certainly plenty of these! Some of them, however, restrict the number of accounts that one player can open and/or the number of welcome offers that one player can claim. So you may not be eligible for the welcome offer or even be able to play at all if you’ve previously played at other sites on the same platform.
- New site on an existing platform (house owned) – this is when an already successful operator launches a new site on their own casino platform e.g. Pub Casino from L&L Europe or more recently, Mega Riches from Videoslots.
- Sportsbook or lottery site that added a casino offer – this type of site has proved very popular with our users over the last couple of years (e.g. Fitzdares and Gentleman Jim) and we expect the trend to continue into 2025, with lottery betting sites such as Lottogo very much in the ascendant.
- Relaunches – it’s quite common for slot sites to open in the UK and not gain much of a player base, either because the operator doesn’t make much of an effort to promote their new site or because the welcome offer isn’t appealing. When a site that few players have even heard of gets a makeover and a new welcome offer, we’ll add it to the listings here.
- Platform changes – sometimes casinos will close on one white label platform and reopen on another, e.g 666 Casino moving from White Hat to Aspire. The player base usually does not transfer so these may as well be brand new sites, with everyone eligible to claim the welcome offer even if they’ve played there before.
We leave slot site listings on this page until we can see from our interaction data reports that no-one who’s looking for a new slot site is interested in them any more, so you may find some sites here that are more than a year old.
Trends and what to expect in 2025
- Game design changes including stake limits – Changes that have already been made to slot game design over the last couple of years include bans on autoplay, on bonus buy and on celebratory animations and the like for wins that are less than the spin value, plus a minimum time of 2.5 seconds between spins. The result of these changes is that some games are getting released late in the UK (e g Starburst XXXtreme) or even not at all (e.g. games with a bonus buy feature that the game provider doesn’t want to remove just for the UK market). Now, the previously introduced changes have been extended to all casino games and more changes are coming. A maximum spin value for slots is planned for the UK of £2 for under 25s and £5 for everyone else; this was supposed to be starting last September but because the necessary secondary legislation wasn’t passed before the General Election was called it was delayed. It’s now going to be implented in two stages; the maximum stake will be £5 starting April 9th 2025 and from May 21st, under 25s will be further restricted to a maximum stake of £2.
- Live casino game shows continue to flourish despite design changes – We expect many more live casino game shows to come out in 2025, and more providers to join the market, even though the slot game design rules have been extended to all other online gambling games starting in January 2025. The main issue is likely to be the ban on autoplay, because with this type of game you only have a small window (typically less than 30 seconds) between games in which you can buy in.
- Even more slot games with higher variance and lower hit rate – An unintended side effect of the last round of design changes is that because small “wins” that are less than spin value are now barely distinguishable from losing spins (in terms of what you see and hear rather than the effect on your bankroll) they no longer contribute to the entertainment value for most players. Therefore, this type of “win” is less likely to be included in the design of future games and this is making everything higher variance, with more losing spins and fewer, bigger wins. The popularity of Big Bass Bonanza (and its even higher variance friends and relatives) is a perfect illustration of this trend and there’s even some slot games now (such as the Money Cart games by Relax Gaming) where any spin in the base game has just two possible outcomes – the bonus round or no win.
- Payment method changes – High tech payment methods such as Trustly, Muchbetter and Astropay now have increasing presence at UK online casinos. This is because they are safe and secure for players but allow operators to be sure that a credit card (which isn’t allowed for gambling transactions) hasn’t been used at any stage of the process. Apple Pay is also gaining traction. Depositing using mobile phone billing, on the other hand, is likely to decline as almost every operator now charges a hefty fee for this service and there’s a rather low ceiling on what you can deposit.
- Mobile slots – As so many players now do all of their play on mobile devices, new slot sites that are designed to work on mobile and/or with the safety and security of a mobile app are in the ascendant, often – like Vegas Moose, Winomania and Happy Tiger – with unique mobile slot games you won’t find anywhere else.
- Affordability checks continue to annoy players – two levels of affordability checks are in the pipeline. The lower level “light touch” financial vulnerability check is fairly unobtrusive (at least for those with an established residence and credit history) and started last August with a trigger level of £500 of net monthly deposits (i.e. the check would be done on any players that deposited £500 more than they withdrew over the last 30 days). Starting in February 2025, the trigger was reduced to £150 net monthly deposits. The higher level financial vulnerability checks are also intended to be “seamless” (apart from when players might be required either to share financial data via open banking or directly provide evidence of affordability to the operator) and a trial has been run with a few big operators to start with using historical data; the indication is that 95%-97% of the checks are able to be carried out without requesting anything from players. The trial has now ended and next steps are likely to be announced in the summer.
- Underwhelming welcome offers – Operators are getting squeezed by the increased burder of regulation and taxation and simply can’t afford to do super generous offers any more. It’s not just the size of the bonus that’s coming down, either – changes in the terms and conditions affecting bonus expiry, caps on what you can win and restrictions on which games you can play with your bonus are all factors that can make a bonus less valuable to the player. No deposit offers are also getting noticeably smaller. The Gambling Commission has now decided not to ban wagering requirements completely, but to cap them at 10x bonus to take effect in December and that will also undoubtedly result in smaller bonuses. Offers that involve cross selling between different types of product are also not going to be allowed, so that could be the end of all those offers with slot spins thrown in.
What certainly won’t be slowing down in 2025 is the rate of release of new slot games; the sheer number of different game providers in the market now ensures that there’s always something new and exciting to play! We expect to see many exciting new slot game bonus features such as BTG’s new Megadozer rolled out in the coming months.
Having said that, last year was all about sequels to already popular games including Immortal Romance II, further instalments in PlayNGo’s Rich Wilde saga (which began with the iconic Book of Dead), more Pirots and Nitropolis games, any number of increasingly wacky variations on Big Bass Bonanza (Big Bass meets Arthurian legend anyone?), Esqueleto Explosivo 3 and Danger High Voltage 2 (complete with the aforementioned Megadozer feature) and we expect to see even more of this trend in 2025 as providers play it safe and re-use themes and characters that players know and love. Indeed, at the iGaming trade show ICE in January 2025, sequels were very much on the menu with Netent showing Finn and the Dragon Tales, ELK showing Pirots 4 and Nitropolis TV, Red Tiger showing Zillard King Megaways and Nolimit showing Tombstone Slaughter.
As the year goes on, sequels are indeed where it’s at including Fluffy Favourites Cash Collect, Tome of Dead, Immortal Romance Vein Of Gold and the release of Avalon III more than 10 years after the previous instalment in the series!
