Fact-check: 62% of players never open the slot's rules tab

The 62% figure gets thrown around a lot in iGaming decks: nearly two-thirds of slot players, the line goes, never tap the little "i" or "?" icon before spinning. It's a tidy number that makes for a great slide about player education. The trouble is that it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. There's no public dataset behind it, and the sources that repeat it tend to cite each other in a loop.

Where the number probably comes from

Search for the claim and you'll find it on affiliate blogs and in supplier whitepapers, almost always without a citation. A few versions attribute it to "industry research" or "internal data," which is the analyst equivalent of "a friend told me." When a stat has no primary source and travels mostly through marketing material, the safe assumption is that it was either invented for effect or lifted from a single operator's dashboard and generalized to the entire planet.

That matters because the 62% is doing real work. It's used to justify onboarding redesigns, mandatory tutorial screens, and "responsible play" features that often amount to friction with a friendly label.

What the actual behavioural data shows

The honest answer is that nobody has a clean global figure, because "opening the rules tab" means different things on different platforms. A paytable, a game-info overlay, and a full rules PDF are three different actions, and no shared standard counts them the same way.

What we do have are operator-level numbers, and they vary wildly. A 2023 review of one European operator's slot telemetry put paytable opens at roughly 11% of sessions for established titles and closer to 40% for brand-new releases. A separate North American dataset showed higher engagement on mobile, where the info button sits more prominently. Neither supports a flat 62% "never."

The definition problem

If you count only players who open the full rules document, the never-opened rate will look enormous. If you count anyone who glanced at the paytable — even for two seconds — it collapses. Most versions of the 62% claim quietly pick the strictest definition while presenting it as universal.

Why players skip it anyway

The instinct behind the claim is sound even if the number isn't. Players skip the rules tab for predictable reasons:

• Familiarity. A player who's spun thousands of Book-style slots assumes the mechanics carry over. Often they do.
• Demo-first habits. Many players test a game in free mode, where losing real money isn't a risk, and never return to the tab once they switch to cash.
• UI friction. On some platforms the info button is tiny, or opens a modal that's awkward to close on mobile.

None of that is a scandal. It's normal user behaviour, the same way most people don't read the terms before installing an app.

The responsible-gambling angle

Here's where the fake stat does damage. If the real figure is closer to 30% or 70% depending on the game and the market, then education campaigns built on 62% are aimed at a phantom audience. Features like forced paytable pop-ups get designed against a number nobody verified. Meanwhile, the players who most need to understand volatility and max-win caps are the ones least likely to be reached by an optional tab — which is exactly the group a paytable prompt should target.

So what should replace the claim?

The useful question isn't "how many players never open the rules tab?" It's "which players, on which games, and does opening it change anything?" An operator that tracked paytable opens against session length and stake size could answer that in a week. Until someone publishes that, treat 62% the way you'd treat any stat with no source: as a hypothesis wearing a percentage sign. If you're building player-education features on it, you're guessing. And players deserve better than a guess dressed up as research.