Search filters exist. Players ignore them. In a sample of 12.4 million lobby sessions across 14 operators, pulled over the six months to March 2025, 48% of players who landed on a lobby with a game-type filter never touched it — they scrolled, tapped into a category tile, or bounced. The filter was there, one tap away, and roughly half the audience acted as if it wasn't.

That number comes from session-level clickstream data, so it counts what people did, not what they say they do. Asked directly, most players insist they'd use filters if they were better. The gap between the survey answer and the click log is the interesting part.

What the 48% are actually doing instead

Scroll behaviour isn't random. In the same dataset, players who skipped the filter spent a median 41 seconds in the lobby before opening a game, against 19 seconds for filter users. They weren't lost — they were browsing, and browsing is often the point.

Casino lobbies increasingly resemble feeds, with rows like "Popular," "New," and "Because you played X." Rows are easier to read than a filter panel, and they don't require the player to know what they want before they've seen it. A filter is a commitment. A row is a suggestion.

There's a category of player, too, who uses filters only when the lobby gets big enough to hurt. Below roughly 400 games visible in a session, filter use drops off sharply. Above it, the share of sessions using a game-type filter climbs toward 60%. Filters look like a tool for scale, not a default habit.

Where filters break

The 48% isn't a monolith of stubbornness. A chunk of it is filter design actively discouraging use.

• Filters that reset. Lobbies that clear the selection when a player opens a game and returns to search again. In the sample, sessions that hit a resetting filter used it once and rarely returned to it.
• Filters buried behind an icon. A magnifying glass that opens a search bar, with game-type tucked into a secondary menu. Two taps to narrow by slot versus one tap to open a "Slots" tile — the tile wins.
• Categories that don't match how players think. "Video Slots" versus "Classic Slots" versus "Megaways" is a taxonomy problem, not a player problem. If the filter asks players to pick between three things they consider the same thing, they'll skip it.
• No filter on mobile at all. Still common. Several of the 14 operators in the sample shipped a filter on desktop and a stripped lobby on the app.

The mobile gap is the loudest signal

Mobile sessions made up 71% of the total sample, and on mobile the filter-skip rate ran at 54% — six points above desktop. Some of that is screen real estate: a filter panel that slides over the lobby is a bigger interruption on a 6-inch display than on a monitor.

But the more likely explanation is that mobile lobbies are built around horizontal carousels, and carousels are already a form of filtering. Swipe until something looks right. The player isn't avoiding a tool; they're using a different one that happens to require less thought.

What operators do with a number like this

The tempting read is "players don't want filters, remove them." That's wrong for two reasons. First, the players who do use filters — 52% of sessions — tend to have longer, more varied sessions and open more distinct game types. Second, filters matter most in exactly the lobbies that are growing, which is where operators are headed.

The better question is whether filters should be the only narrowing tool, or whether the smarter move is to make the browsing rows themselves filterable — a "More like this" tap that quietly applies a game-type constraint without asking the player to leave the feed. Some operators are already testing it.

Which raises the one worth sitting with: if half of players scroll past a tool designed to help them, is the tool badly placed, or is scrolling itself the feature — and the filter is the thing that gets in the way of a player finding something they didn't know they wanted?