Game outcomes on gaming devices are typically determined at random where winning outcomes award a player money, credits, promotions, prizes, or other incentives, and losing outcomes typically result only in a lost wager. Player excitement is typically generated by providing the possibility of winning large awards for a relatively meager wager. Business principles require that most outcomes not be large winning outcomes for the player. However, this often times must be balanced with giving the player some incentive to keep playing. Therefore smaller valued winning outcomes are typically included in the game to drive up the hit frequency of winning outcomes while not awarding extremely large prizes too often.
Most multi-game jackpots utilize coin-in data to simultaneously drive up the amount of the jackpot award and to determine if the particular wager generating the coin-in data has met the triggering condition for the jackpot. That is, wagers made from gaming devices connected to the multi-game jackpot are typically used to fund the jackpot as well as determining if the jackpot is to be awarded to the wagering gaming device. A small percentage of the wager is generally added to the jackpot amount to continually drive up the jackpot amount. A multi-game jackpot may be connected to a bank or group of games, all games in a casino, or games in multiple casino properties. Naturally, the more games that are connected to the multi-game jackpot, the more quickly the jackpot amount will grow. Various methods may be used to determine when the jackpot is awarded. One common method is to randomly choose a triggering value from a large range of values and then determine when that value has been reached. For example, a coin-in value may be randomly selected as the triggering value in the range of 1 to 1 million. If the triggering value was randomly selected as 658,150, the 658,150th coin wagered on one of the connected gaming devices from the start of the bonus cycle would trigger the bonus to be awarded to the wagering game device. One issue with this award-selecting scheme, and other methods of determining when to award a multi-game jackpot, is that players often are not as willing to play the connected games when at the start of the bonus cycle. That is players know that the chance of winning the bonus again right after is has been awarded (i.e., at the start of new bonus cycle) is smaller than after the bonus has been built up for a while.