Is the slot you keep calling Megaways actually Megaways?

Megaways is a trademark, not a generic slot-industry term

Big Time Gaming's homepage still says it plainly: "Megaways™, the groundbreaking slot mechanic created by Big Time Gaming, whose innovation reshaped modern slot design." The company built the mechanic for Dragon Born in 2016. Two years later it opened the name to other studios as a paid licence, and Blueprint signed on that April as one of the first partners, according to trade coverage from the time. The name is not free.

A licence today covers three related names rather than one. Megaways is the original. Megaclusters and Megapays followed, and the last of those is already open to every studio partnered with Relax Gaming, per the company's own current site. The page lists a contact address for a studio that wants one: licensing@bigtimegaming.com.

That single fact separates a slot-industry term from a piece of intellectual property. A studio can build a reel that changes height every spin and call it almost anything. It cannot call it Megaways unless Big Time Gaming has said yes.

Two titles on this site hold the actual licence

Under that definition, two titles in this database are confirmed. Two hold it. Seventeen do not.

Extra Chilli

Big Time Gaming · Slot

RTP published

96.15%–96.41%

2 configurations

Max win

16,877×

of stake

Not scored yet

Big Time Gaming · disclosure grade UNKNOWN

Extra Chilli is Big Time Gaming's own game, so the licence question does not even arise. 5 Lions Megaways belongs to Pragmatic Play, and its own launch article names the mechanic directly rather than describing a lookalike feature it built independently.

5 Lions Megaways

Pragmatic Play · Slot

RTP published

96.50%

1 configuration

Max win

—

not published

Not scored yetHigh volatilityDemo

Pragmatic Play · disclosure grade B

Both titles state the identical ceiling, 117,649 ways, reached only when every reel shows its full height on a given spin. That figure is the maximum, not the number of ways in play on an ordinary spin, and both studios say so in their own material rather than leaving a reader to assume it.

Seventeen more borrow the shape without the name

The rest of this catalogue is where the confusion actually lives. Seventeen titles use a ways-type layout structurally close to a Megaways reel, and none of them carries the trademark. Ali Baba tops out at 32,400 ways on JILI's own page, a ceiling in the same range as a licensed title. Not licensed, though. Not once mentioned.

The pattern repeats across the studios behind the other sixteen. Prosperity Fortune Tree lists 4,096 ways on PG Soft's own sheet. Speed Winner reaches that same 32,400 ceiling as Ali Baba, on a different studio's page entirely. Wild Bounty Showdown fixes its count at a flat 3,600 rather than a range. 5 Lions Gold, from Pragmatic Play itself, the studio that holds the one confirmed licence here, tops out at 243. None of the four names Big Time Gaming, a licence, or the word Megaways anywhere in that material.

The ceiling itself explains why the two are so easy to confuse with the seventeen. A Megaways reel shows between two and seven symbols on a given spin, across six reels, and seven raised to the sixth power comes out to exactly 117,649, the figure both Big Time Gaming and Pragmatic Play print for their licensed titles. A wide ways reel with no licence at all can land on a similarly large number using the identical arithmetic, on a grid built to a different size. The number alone proves nothing.

That is not an accusation. A studio needs no permission to build a reel that resizes each spin. It needs permission for one thing only: the name printed on the box.

Does the licence change anything a player can actually measure?

Not on the numbers this site tracks. RTP, hit frequency and max win are set by each studio's own mathematics, licensed or not. Nothing about the trademark governs how a game pays out. A reader chasing return alone gets nothing new from knowing which two titles hold the licence.

What the licence buys is narrower than that. It confirms the mechanic behind the reels is the one Big Time Gaming built and keeps developing, checked against its own specification rather than a separate studio's version of the same idea. Not the mechanic's fairness. Not its payout. Just the name, and who earned the right to print it.

Whether that distinction matters to a given player is not a question this site can answer for them. It can only say plainly which titles are entitled to make the claim, and which are not.

The gap this record cannot close, and where to check the rest

Big Time Gaming's program is three licences, not one. Megaways came first. Megaclusters and Megapays followed, and the last one is already open to every partner studio in Relax Gaming's own roster, by the company's account. Three separate agreements, three separate rosters, and only one of them touches a title that appears on this site.

None of the studios named above appear on Big Time Gaming's own current list of active partners. That is a gap this record states rather than guesses past. A studio could hold a licence for a title not yet seeded here. Nobody outside Big Time Gaming's own books knows the complete roster.

For either confirmed title, [the operators this site has actually read terms for](/casinos) are a separate question entirely from the mechanic behind the reels. The licence says who built the game. It says nothing about who is straight with the terms once it is spinning.

The next family, Megapays, is already spreading through one studio's whole partner roster rather than being licensed title by title. The next confirmation of who holds it will come the same way this page's two did: from a studio's own release page, never from a reel that merely looks the part.