Progressive Jackpot
A progressive jackpot grows with every bet — a slice of each wager feeds a prize pool that keeps rising until one player wins it.
What it means
A progressive jackpot takes a small contribution from every qualifying bet — commonly somewhere between 0.5% and a few percent of stake — and adds it to a growing prize pool. When the jackpot hits, the pool resets to a guaranteed starting amount called the seed and starts climbing again. Pools can be local (funded by one operator's players) or networked across every casino running the same game, which is how prizes reach the tens of millions.
Why it matters for operators
Progressives are marketing you rent rather than buy: a networked pot in the millions draws players no standalone game can, and the jackpot counter itself is an acquisition asset. The accounting matters, though. The contribution comes out of your margin — a slot with 96% base RTP and a 2% jackpot contribution effectively pays local players 94% plus a rare, shared prize. Who funds the seed after a win, how contributions cross currencies, and what happens to liability if you leave the network are contract questions to settle before integration, not after.
Example
An operator adds a networked progressive family through its aggregator. Each bet routes a 1.5% contribution to the network pool. Eight months later a player on a different casino in the same network hits the 4 million prize — the network operator pays the win, every casino's pool resets to the seed, and the counter starts climbing again.