PG Soft Slots: Mahjong Ways, Fortune Tiger & UK Guide

By Jack Henshaw, Head Writer · Published 22 August 2026 · Licences checked against the UKGC, MGA and Gibraltar registers

PG Soft is one of the most recognisable studios in mobile slots and one of the most widely misdescribed. It is licensed in Malta, it has never held a British licence, and it is not on the Gibraltar register either — despite an industry-wide habit of claiming all three. This review sets out what the registers actually show, which of its games a British player can legitimately reach, and what its published figures do and do not mean.

PG Soft at a glance

Licence data from the UK Gambling Commission and Malta Gaming Authority registers, both checked 24 August 2026. Game data from PG Soft’s own published material.

The licence question, answered properly

Search for PG Soft and you will quickly find it described as licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority, Gibraltar and the UK Gambling Commission. Two of those three are wrong, and the error is repeated by platform suppliers, affiliate sites and, remarkably, by British casinos on their own consumer-facing pages.

Malta is real. Pocket Games Software Limited holds authorisation MGA/B2B/435/2017, a Type 1 B2B critical supply licence, and the MGA’s own register shows it as Licensed with no termination date.

There is a wrinkle in that history worth recording. The MGA suspended the authorisation on 29 September 2020, on three grounds: failure to notify the regulator of a change in direct or indirect qualifying shareholding within the statutory thirty days, and failure to file industry performance returns for both halves of 2019. The licence is active again today. The MGA does not publish reinstatement notices, so the date it was restored is not on the public record.

That suspension notice is also the only public confirmation that PG Soft’s ownership changed around 2019 or 2020. Who acquired the stake has never been disclosed, and no parent company, holding company or investor appears in any source we could reach. The various claims linking PG Soft to named Asian gaming groups rest on nothing more than the companies appearing together in affiliate listings.

Britain is not real, and never was. We searched all four UK Gambling Commission public register datasets — 2,658 businesses, 4,523 licences, 2,434 trading names and 2,241 domain names. There are zero matches for “pocket games”, “pg soft” or “pgsoft”. That absence also rules out a historic licence, because the register retains surrendered, lapsed and revoked entries, and hundreds are listed. PG Soft is not among them.

Romania is real, and usually overlooked. Pocket Games Software Limited appears on the ONJN Class II licensed supplier register under decision 100 of 13 February 2025, valid from 1 March 2025, for the distribution of specialised gambling software. It is the studio’s second genuine European licence and almost nobody mentions it.

We also checked and could not find PG Soft on the supplier registers of Denmark, Sweden or Greece, and neither the Netherlands nor Italy operates a supplier register at all — in those two markets games reach players through a licensed operator or concessionaire rather than a licensed studio.

Gibraltar appears not to be real either. The Gibraltar Gambling Division publishes a full register of licence holders; we read all 58 entries and PG Soft is not among them, though many of its direct competitors are. Its own website nonetheless displays a Gibraltar government crest as a licensing badge.

So can you play PG Soft games in Britain?

Yes, some of them — and this is where most coverage goes wrong in the other direction.

PG Soft titles are genuinely live and playable on British sites operating under UK Gambling Commission licences. We found them running on LeoVegas and Pink Casino, both declared domains of the same licensed operator. The catalogue offered is a small curated subset rather than the roughly 190-title global portfolio: titles such as Jack the Giant Hunter, Wild Heist Cashout, Legend of Perseus, Shaolin Soccer, Candy Burst, Fortune Dragon and Mahjong Ways.

How is that lawful when PG Soft holds no British licence? Because under section 41 of the Gambling Act 2005 the requirement falls on whoever supplies the gambling software in the course of business. A licensed British operator can offer a game so long as a UKGC gambling-software licensee supplies it.

PG Soft reaches operators almost entirely through aggregators rather than directly, and several of those partners hold exactly the British licence it lacks. Relax Gaming has carried the catalogue since January 2018, the longest-standing of the arrangements; EveryMatrix took the full portfolio onto its casino platform in October 2019, with Pariplay following the same week. Later partners include Gamingtec in 2021, Slotegrator in 2022 and QTech in 2025. We could not verify from outside which of them hosts any given game launch on a British site, so we are not going to name one.

Two things follow for you as a player. First, if you meet a PG Soft game at a properly licensed British casino, the game itself sits inside that operator’s regulated environment and the usual protections apply. Second, and more important: a site is not licensed because it carries PG Soft games. Any site offering Fortune Tiger to a British player and citing PG Soft’s own licensing as its credential is telling you nothing, because there is no British licence to cite.

It is worth noting what is not available. Fortune Tiger, the studio’s biggest game in the world, is on neither British site we checked, and nor are Fortune Ox, Fortune Rabbit, Treasures of Aztec or Lucky Neko.

The essential PG Soft games

Figures and release dates taken from PG Soft’s own game pages. Volatility labels are the studio’s. Third-party databases disagreed with the studio’s own release dates on eight of the nine titles we cross-checked, sometimes by ten months, so we use the studio’s dates throughout.

Two families define this studio. The Mahjong Ways pair took a game most Western players had never seen on a slot reel and built a genuinely distinctive cascading structure around it, with golden symbol conversion and rising multipliers. The zodiac series did something commercially cleverer, which the next section covers.

Beyond those, Treasures of Aztec and Lucky Neko are the studio’s strongest conventional designs. Lucky Neko’s extra reel above the main grid pushes it to 32,400 ways, and its cat symbol multiplier is the mechanic most often imitated from this catalogue.

One correction while we are here. There is no PG Soft game called Mahjong Ways 3. A game of that name exists, but it is published by a different studio, and it confusingly carries the same 96.92 per cent return as PG Soft’s original. PG Soft’s catalogue contains exactly two Mahjong titles.

The zodiac series, and what it reveals

Since 2020, PG Soft has released one zodiac-animal title every Lunar New Year: Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake and, in January 2026, Horse. Seven titles, seven years, one per festival. It is the most disciplined release calendar of any studio we review.

The chart shows what changed across those seven years, and it is instructive. The maximum win climbed from 1,000x to 10,000x — a tenfold increase. The published return did not move at all: every one of the seven sits between 96.74 and 96.96 per cent.

That is the modern slot market in miniature. The number that governs your long-run outcome stayed flat to two decimal places, while the number that sells the game grew by a factor of ten. Nothing improved for the player. The advertising simply got louder.

The 100,000x problem

Several PG Soft games carry a headline maximum win of 100,000x, including Mahjong Ways 2, Treasures of Aztec, Lucky Neko and Ganesha Gold. It is the most eye-catching number in the catalogue, and it needs context.

Exactly 27 titles carry that figure, and every one of them was released between November 2017 and June 2022. No PG Soft game since carries it. That pattern is characteristic of a legacy specification tag rather than a live description of each game’s maths.

Simulation-based sources record far lower practical maxima on those same titles — in the range of a few thousand times stake rather than a hundred thousand. We cannot verify those simulations to a primary source, and we are not presenting them as the studio’s figures. But the gap between a published theoretical ceiling and anything ever actually recorded is, on these games, enormous.

Read 100,000x as what it is: the largest number the maths can theoretically produce, published by the studio, on games that stopped carrying that claim four years ago.

Brazil, where PG Soft is genuinely enormous

PG Soft’s British footprint is marginal. Its Brazilian one is not. Independent catalogue analysis across several hundred Brazilian brands puts PG Soft second in the market on catalogue share at around 11 per cent, behind only Pragmatic Play. Seven of the fifteen most popular titles in the country are PG Soft’s, and Fortune Tiger has been the single most-played title for 41 consecutive months.

That success has a complicated shadow. In Brazil the word “tigrinho” — little tiger — became shorthand for online gambling as a whole, and a great deal of reporting about gambling harm uses it generically. The very large financial figures attached to that reporting are whole-sector numbers drawn from central bank data. They describe Brazilian online gambling, not this studio.

Much of the specific harm coverage concerns counterfeit applications imitating Fortune Tiger rather than the certified game. The widely repeated claim that the game’s real return is around 20 per cent almost certainly describes those rigged clones. We have seen no lab report or court finding supporting it against the certified build, so we are not repeating it as fact.

On licensing, the position is often stated wrongly. PG Soft holds no Brazilian licence, but that is not evasion: Brazil’s supplier-recognition regime was still in public consultation through 2026 and no such licence category was open. PG Soft games reach Brazil through authorised bet.br operators, with the authorisation held by the operator and the games tested by an accredited laboratory.

Which build are you actually getting?

Every figure in our table is the highest build PG Soft publishes, and we can demonstrate that rather than assume it. The studio’s own game pages contain a renderer that outputs an RTP range whenever a title’s minimum and maximum configurations differ, and the field in its public catalogue feed is literally named maxrtp.

So lower builds exist. The endpoint that would list them is geo-blocked from the United Kingdom, so we cannot tell you what they are, and we are not going to print a number we could not retrieve.

What that means in practice is simple. If you open a PG Soft game at a British casino and the rules screen shows something below 96.7 per cent, you have not found an error — you have found a lower configuration, which the operator licensed and the studio supplied. The rules screen is the number that binds. On this catalogue, check it every time.

How it compares

Positions as at August 2026.

Safer play

A studio’s reputation, its licences and its published returns tell you whether a game is built properly. None of them tells you a session will go well. Over any period you will actually play, variance dominates the return figure completely.

Decide what an evening is worth before you open anything, and set a deposit limit at your casino rather than relying on judgement in the moment. If gambling has stopped being entertainment, BeGambleAware offers free, confidential support, and GAMSTOP blocks you from every UKGC-licensed site at once.

Our verdict

All Slot Providers score: 6/10.

As a game studio, PG Soft is genuinely good. The art direction is the most distinctive in mobile slots, the mahjong and zodiac families are real design ideas rather than reskins, and the published returns on its flagship titles — consistently between 96.7 and 97 per cent — are better than most of the industry manages. A release cadence of 19 to 20 titles a year, held steady since 2022, is disciplined rather than frantic.

The problems are all around the games rather than in them. The studio publishes only its highest build and geo-blocks the endpoint that would reveal the others. A legacy 100,000x tag still sits on games that stopped earning it years ago. Its own website has displayed licensing badges for two jurisdictions we cannot find it registered in, and quietly removed one of them. Its ownership is undisclosed, and the only public evidence that it changed at all is a regulator’s suspension notice.

For a British player the practical position is narrow but clear. A handful of PG Soft titles are legitimately available at properly licensed British casinos, supplied under someone else’s licence, and those are fine to play with the rules screen open. Everything else — and in particular any site that offers you Fortune Tiger and points at PG Soft’s licensing as its credential — is not operating under British regulation at all.

PG Soft: FAQs

Is PG Soft licensed in the UK?

No. No PG Soft entity appears in any of the four UK Gambling Commission public registers, and the registers retain surrendered and revoked entries, so it has never held a British licence. It is genuinely licensed in Malta and, since March 2025, in Romania. Claims that it holds a UK licence appear on many industry sites and are wrong.

Can I play PG Soft games at a UK casino?

Some of them, yes. A curated subset is live at British licensed casinos, supplied under a third party’s gambling software licence rather than PG Soft’s own. Fortune Tiger, its biggest game worldwide, was not among them when we checked.

Who owns PG Soft?

It is not publicly disclosed. The legal entity is Pocket Games Software Limited, Malta registration C 76195. The only public evidence of an ownership change is a 2020 Malta Gaming Authority suspension notice citing an unreported change in qualifying shareholding. Claims linking the studio to named Asian gaming groups are unsupported.

What is PG Soft’s most popular slot?

Fortune Tiger, by a wide margin, and overwhelmingly because of Brazil, where it has been the most-played title for 41 consecutive months. Mahjong Ways is the more influential design.

What is the biggest win possible on a PG Soft slot?

Several titles publish 100,000 times stake, including Mahjong Ways 2, Treasures of Aztec and Lucky Neko. All 27 games carrying that figure were released between 2017 and mid-2022, and no newer PG Soft game claims it, which suggests a legacy specification rather than a live description.

Is Mahjong Ways 3 made by PG Soft?

No. PG Soft’s catalogue contains exactly two Mahjong titles. A Mahjong Ways 3 exists but is published by a different studio, and confusingly carries the same 96.92 per cent return as the PG Soft original.

Why do PG Soft RTPs differ between casinos?

Because the figures the studio publishes are its highest builds, and lower configurations exist. Its own game pages contain a renderer that outputs an RTP range where configurations differ, and its catalogue field is named for the maximum. Read the in-game rules screen for the build you have been given.