The Gambling Industry Monthly Review - September 2026

September served up nearly twenty new slots and one clear obsession: the running multiplier that keeps climbing the longer you play. Off the reels, the month split in two, with Brazil banning online betting overnight while New Zealand auctioned the licences for a market it is only just building. Here is what shaped the industry in September 2026.

Almost twenty slots landed in September, and the single heaviest was NoLimit City's Duck Hunters 2, out on 10 September. The sequel runs on a 5x6 grid where every cleared cell banks a 2x multiplier that doubles each time it wins again, so one position can reach 16,384x before the spin is done. xWays stretch symbols taller, Infectious xWays copy the effect across the board, Bombs blow holes in it, and the Juicer modes let you start with those multipliers already warm. At 96.00% RTP, extreme volatility and a 40,000x max win, nothing else this month asked for more patience or paid it back as hard.

The month's real signature belonged to Paperclip Gaming. Stake's in-house studio put out four cluster slots in four weeks, Cursed King, Toon Sailor, Sky Drop and Cyber Blade, every one of them running the same engine: multipliers scattered across the reels get added into a single global total that keeps climbing and never resets once the bonus begins. Toon Sailor is the pick of the four. Its Anchor drops an Expanded Wild down a full reel, each reel carries its own multiplier, and the Broadside buy loads every reel with at least 10x before handing over two guaranteed wilds. The four share a 96.00% RTP and a 25,000x max win, and between them they made the running-multiplier cluster the shape of the month.

As usual, Pragmatic Play out-produced everyone. Its sharpest release was Ra vs Osiris on 3 September, which makes you pick a side before a reel turns: Ra pays smaller bonuses more often, Osiris pays rarely and heavily, and the VS Wild swells to fill a reel while two multipliers up to 1,000x fight over which one sticks, landing a 25,000x max win either way. The studio also folded two flagships into its pocket-sized POP format with Gates of Olympus POP and the frog-stacked Triple Hop Pots, wrapped a cluster board into a 43-position summoning circle in Coven Rising, and dropped the Big Bass fisherman into Las Vegas in Big Bass Vegas 1000, where twin Wild meters lift it to a 15,000x max win.

Hacksaw Gaming worked both ends of the scale. Fist of Destruction Megamultiplier is the brawler, stacking Wild Reels worth 2x to 200x and adding a Megamultiplier that can pay the full 15,000x straight from the base game. The rest ran calmer: the comic-book Dr Zappo bounces an EyeBall wild off three energy fields toward a 10,000x max win, Great Game Serengeti turns its hunt loose across the savannah, and three tidy Hold & Win games, Tres Piñatas, Le Bandit and 3 Magic Piggy Banks, keep things near 2,500x for players who want the coins without the drop.

The common thread was the running multiplier: pooled, carried over and left to compound through the bonus, from Duck Hunters 2's self-doubling cells to Paperclip's four global-total clusters. Stir in Pragmatic's POP experiments and a lobby stacked with vampires, witches and gods, and September rewarded the players who stayed in a bonus long enough to let the number build, not the ones chasing a single big line.

The month's defining move came from Brazil, where the government switched off a licensed betting market barely a year old. On 25 September, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Provisional Measure 1.394, banning the operation, offer, intermediation, and advertising of fixed-odds betting, covering sports betting and online casino games alike. Deposits stopped on 25 September, licensed sites and apps go dark from 6 October, and banks and payment firms can no longer process betting transactions except to close accounts and refund players. It reaches offshore operators serving Brazilians too, and it takes immediate effect but must be approved by Congress within 120 days to remain in force.

Lula sold it as a public-health measure, and the pitch has steep numbers behind it: the central bank estimated that Brazilians spend about R$60 billion on bets on a yearly basis, barely a year after the regulated market opened in January 2025. The industry's losses are just as sharp. Brazil's government will not return R$2.55 billion (about US$490 million) in betting licence fees, ending five-year licences with years still to run, trade body ANJL said the ban would push more than 30 million bettors onto illegal websites, and industry groups took the ban to the Supreme Court on 28 September. The timing was no accident, landing days before the Oct. 4 first-round vote, with Lula locked in a tight race.

In the United States, the sweepstakes crackdown kept grinding, just more quietly than over the summer. September brought a slowdown in changes to sweepstakes casino availability, a month of exits rather than fresh state bans: LuckyLand Slots and CoinFrenzy closed, while Pennsylvania proposed a new ban and VGW settled in New York. No single headline, but the squeeze on sweepstakes casinos has not eased.

New Zealand spent the month moving the other way. New Zealand's online casino licence auction was held on 29 September 2026, the gateway to a market capped at a maximum of 15 licences, with no operator allowed significant influence over more than three. Winning a slot in that auction buys only the right to apply: successful bidders need to complete a separate application process before they can operate, and licences run for up to three years initially, with the option to renew for five. Entain wasted no time, unveiling BlackRush Casino, a brand built specifically for New Zealand's incoming online casino market, within days of the hammer falling.

The United Kingdom spent September setting up its next fight. Vicky Foxcroft, the UK's new gambling minister, confirmed the government is preparing a consultation on the Gambling Act's "aim to permit" rules, the clause that restricts local authorities from denying applications for gambling venues even if councils or residents object. A day later, the Gambling Commission's second-phase deposit-limit deadline landed on 30 September, handing players firmer tools to cap their own spending.

Taken together, September was a month of doors opening and slamming shut at once. Brazil tore down a betting market it had only just built, New Zealand started building one from scratch, and the US and UK kept narrowing the room operators have to move. On the reels, the studios spent the month teaching players to wait, stacking bonuses that only pay off for those who let the multiplier climb. Both halves point the same way into the final quarter: fewer easy wins, and far more riding on how long you stay in.