What is Game Specification Sheet?

A game specification sheet is the block of figures a studio publishes for one of its titles: return to player, a volatility rating, a hit frequency, a maximum payout, the grid and line count, the stake range and a release date. Some studios publish all of it, some publish a return and nothing else, and a few publish none of it at all. It matters because it is the only first-hand source that exists. Every affiliate page, database and comparison table is downstream of it, and figures that circulate without a studio behind them tend to have been copied from another site that copied them from a third. Where a number cannot be traced back to the studio, the honest thing is to say the number is not published rather than to reproduce a plausible one. The sheets are not infallible, and the failure worth knowing is internal disagreement. A studio's marketing paragraph and its own specification block sit on the same page and are written by different people, so a game described as a cluster game in prose can be listed as a ways game in the specification, or a line count in the copy can differ from the line count in the table. When that happens there is no way to choose between them from outside, and a page that quietly picks one is presenting a guess as a fact. Naming the disagreement is the only honest option, and it is more useful to a reader than a confident wrong number.