We gave the casino a stop button
Flickloot sells nothing. The coins are free, they are worth nothing anywhere, and nobody can cash them out. I built a stop button into it anyway, because gambling can create addiction at any level and for everyone, and a free game does not stand outside that. If a game is made to be played again and again, it needs a way to stop that does not depend on the player noticing the moment.
What went live
Before the first spin, the game asks for an 18+ declaration. Then it watches the session for three things: play between midnight and six in the morning, local time; a session that has run past an hour; and a balance that has fallen by half while the bets keep getting bigger. When one of them trips, the game says so and the Continue button stays disabled for 60 seconds. The pause is the point. A message you can click past is decoration.
All of it runs in the browser. Nothing is stored, there is no IP check and no account, so the game does not know who you are. It knows what the last hour looked like.
The moment
Anyone who watches how people play for long enough sees the same moment come round. Someone wins big. The sensible thing is to take the profit out and leave a little to keep playing, not too much. Some people do exactly that. Others carry on until the whole win has gone back, and the thought is always the same: someone should have stopped that. The ones who self-exclude straight after a very big win have it right, and it is what I would do myself. The button is for everybody else.
Why an operator should want one
Sweepstakes operators are mostly competing for market share, and safer gambling does not move market share this quarter. It moves something else. If the industry wants a decent image, and wants the American authorities to let it keep working, it has to start taking this seriously before somebody turns it into a campaign. Picture a candidate somewhere deciding these companies are destroying people’s lives. The operator who can answer with what is already in place, and let them test it, is in a different conversation from the one who cannot.
Safer gambling is not only the player’s job. It is ours as well, whether the authorities ask for it or the other companies bother. Nobody asked us for the button, and the Continue key waits sixty seconds anyway.